Our History and Team
Our History
The WellSAT Suite is a collaboration between the UConn Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health and the UConn Collaboratory on School and Child Health. The Suite encompasses two tools, the WellSAT 3.0 and the WellSAT WSCC 2.0.
WellSAT
The WellSAT (Wellness School Assessment Tool) was developed by the Rudd Center in response to the 2006 federal requirement that all school districts participating in the federal meal programs had to put in place a school wellness policy to help schools focus on issues related to childhood obesity. The tool was created to quantify school wellness policies so that school districts could score their policies to see how they compared to best practices, and so researchers could score policies to evaluate if the strength of the policy was associated with better outcomes.
The tool has been used by researchers, state government agencies, and individual school districts since its inception. It was updated in 2014 (v 2.0) and again in 2019 (v 3.0) in response to additional federal requirements around physical activity and nutrition.
WellSAT WSCC
In 2014, the ASCD and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) jointly developed the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) Model, which prioritizes the necessity of collaboration across education and health sectors to accomplish child well-being.
In 2019, the Rudd Center and CSCH collaborated to create the WellSAT WSCC, which expands the WellSAT Tool to extend to the ten domains outlined in the WSCC Model, as well as a section that addresses integration, implementation, communication and evaluation of WSCC-related policies and the wellness promotion and marketing section already in the WellSAT. To develop the WellSAT WSCC, researchers from the Rudd Center and CSCH consulted national guidelines, recommendations from primary organizations, and synthesis of the literature in each of the domains of the WSCC model. The teams then consulted with research and practice experts to finalize the items included within each domain. In 2021, the WellSAT WSCC team revised the tool (v 2.0).
Our Team
Marlene Schwartz, Director at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health
Sandra Chafouleas, Director of the UConn Collaboratory on School and Child Health
Sarah McKee, Graduate Student in Human Development and Family Sciences and Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health
Jessica Koslouski, Assistant Research Professor at the UConn Collaboratory on School and Child Health
Helene Marcy, Director of Programs & Communications at the UConn Collaboratory on School and Child Health
The original WellSAT WSCC 1.0 was developed by Marlene Schwartz, Sandra Chafouleas, Taylor Koriakin, and Sarah McKee.