Promoting Health and Academic Success: The Wscc Approach

Promoting Health and Academic Success promotes understanding of the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) model and the relationship between health and academic success; its role in promoting DEI; and planning, implementation, and evaluation related to WSCC.

David A. Birch, PhD, is a professor emeritus in the department of health science at the University of Alabama. He served as a professor and the department chair from 2011 to 2018 and was coordinator of the doctoral program from 2018 to 2020. He previously served as a professor and the chair of the department of health education and recreation at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and as a faculty member at Indiana University and Penn State University.

Birch is a past president of the American Association for Health Education (AAHE) and the Society for Public Health Education (SOPHE). He has served on the board of directors of AAHE, the American School Health Association (ASHA), and the National Association of Health Education Centers as well as on the SOPHE board of trustees. He is currently a board member of the Foundation for the Advancement of Health Education (FAHE) and is on the editorial board of Health Education & Behavior. He is a former editorial board member for the Journal of School Health, Pedagogy in Health Promotion: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and the American Journal of Health Studies.

Birch is a charter fellow of AAHE and an ASHA fellow. He has received the highest professional award from three organizations--the ASHA William A. Howe Award (2019), the SOPHE Distinguished Fellow Award (2018), and the Eta Sigma Gamma Honor Award (2015)--along with numerous other professional awards. He was Illinois State University’s 2008 Ann E. Nolte Scholar in Health Education. As a faculty member at Indiana University, he received the Trustees’ Teaching Award and the Teaching Excellence Recognition Award.

Donna M. Videto, PhD, RMCHES, is a SUNY distinguished service professor and professor emerita of health. She has worked in school health education and pedagogy for over 40 years. She has worked with school districts in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and New York to advance school health and the WSCC model, and she taught K-12 health education early in her career. Currently she works in international education, developing courses and teaching in Italy and the Czech Republic.

Recently retired from SUNY Cortland, where she taught graduate and undergraduate students in health education and education, Videto also served as the coordinator of student teaching in health education and the director of the faculty development center. She has written over 30 publications, including the books Promoting Health and Academic Success: The Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child Approach and 2011 Needs Assessment and Program Planning for Health Education and Health Promotion, and she has made over 150 national, regional, and state-level presentations at conferences and as part of her committee work for SOPHE, AAHE, and ASHA. An AAHE fellow and recipient of the Delbert Oberteuffer Mortar Board for excellence in school health education preparation, she recently completed her position as the vice president of the Foundation for the Advancement of Health Education (FAHE) and currently serves as a scholarship application reviewer for that foundation.

Hannah P. Catalano, PhD, MCHES, is an associate professor of public health at University of North Carolina-Wilmington (UNCW). She currently serves on the board of directors for the American School Health Association (ASHA) and cochairs the ASHA Research and Publications Committee. She is an editorial board member for the Journal of School Health, a member of the National Committee on the Future of School Health Education, and a member of the SOPHE Think Tank work group that provides strategic direction on the Institute for Higher Education Academy.

Catalano is a founding faculty fellow of the UNC-UNCW Research Collaboratory in the College of Health & Human Services at UNCW. She also founded and currently leads the university’s Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child Research Collaboratory (WSCCRC), which is a unique initiative to engage college students in scholarly discussions around WSCC and to facilitate meaningful research on the model. She previously served as a member of the National Consensus for School Health Education’s Expert Review Group and is a former Future Leaders Academy Fellow of ASHA and NextUp Leadership Development Fellow of UNCW.