Page 19 - The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 9-12: Health and Physical Education, 2015 - revised

the framework of a healthy, safe, inclusive, and accepting school. Establishing a healthy- school committee, consisting of staff, students, and parents, or working with an existing committee for student well-being and positive school climate can provide support for healthy-school initiatives. Encouraging a positive and proactive attitude towards healthy, active living and an inclusive school climate is key to success.
The principal is responsible for ensuring that all students, including students with special education needs, have the opportunity to participate in health and physical education in a safe manner. Timetables should have sufficient flexibility to allow the use of some same-sex and some coeducational groupings for curriculum delivery where appropriate or needed.
The expectations in the health and physical education curriculum can be met in a variety of settings, including the outdoors, and using a broad range of equipment. Ensuring that teachers have the support, resources, and equipment they need to deliver a high-quality program is essential. Additional teacher support to ensure student safety and to increase teachers’ knowledge, awareness, and comfort level may be required. Principals can provide this support by working with the school board and community partners, including public health units, and by supporting professional learning networks and mentoring within the school community. Principals play an essential leadership role in supporting teacher learning through sharing resources and expertise and in furthering the use of creative approaches, the integration of learning across the curriculum, and the nurturing of partnerships within the school system and with other members of the broader community.
In all these respects, principals coordinate the implementation in their schools of
various government and school board initiatives and programs focused on the health and well-being of students in Ontario. In recent years, these initiatives have embraced
a holistic approach, promoting all aspects of health and well-being – physical, cognitive, emotional, and social – as part of supporting students in developing skills for healthy, active living. Principals work to create and maintain a positive school climate, consistent with Foundations for a Healthy School (see page 10), and actively support mental health promotion and prevention, aligning school mental health initiatives with board mental health strategies as part of the wider system of care envisioned in Ontario’s Comprehensive Mental Health and Addiction Strategy (2011).
Community Partners
Community partners are an important resource for a school’s health and physical education program. Relationships with public health units, community recreation facilities, community mental health organizations and hospitals, social service agencies, universities and colleges, businesses, service groups, and other community organizations can provide valuable support and enrichment for student learning. These organizations can provide expertise, skills, materials, and programs that are not available through the school or that supplement those that are. Partnerships with such organizations benefit not only the students but also the life of the community.
Public health units are one of the most valuable sources of support in the community
for health and physical education programs, as they can provide health expertise in a number of areas that are relevant to the curriculum. Local health unit staff are involved
in work on initiatives such as immunization, safe food handling, reproductive and sexual health, substance-use prevention, the prevention of chronic diseases (e.g., through tobacco control or promotion of healthy eating), the promotion of physical activity, the prevention of injury, and the control of infectious diseases.
INTRODUCTION
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