Finding balance in one’s physical, mental, and social wellness is the fundamental foundation for a healthy life. Health education, in addition to teaching key concepts or knowledge, also teaches a variety of skills that promotes lifelong wellness. This knowledge includes the most important and enduring ideas, issues, and concepts related to achieving good health. The skills include how to access reliable information, self-management, identifying internal and external influences and ways to respond to those influences, interpersonal communication skills, goal setting, decision making, and advocating skills for oneself and others about health issues.
The ninth grade program targets personal and consumer health, mental/emotional health, injury prevention, nutrition and fitness, substance abuse prevention, sexuality, and environmental health. A Connecticut state mandate requires substance abuse education each year and HIV/AIDS education on a consistent and on-going basis. Students learn through an interactive program that allows them to personalize the knowledge, believe it, understand its importance and personal relevance, believe in their own ability to act upon it, and then actually act upon that knowledge when necessary.
Senior-wellness courses offer another opportunity to discuss relevant health content in preparation for life outside of Ridgefield High School. Students have a choice between wellness beyond high school or health, ethics, and current events. Wellness beyond high school is a health course for students who want to explore the unique health and lifestyle issues that arise after graduation from high school. There is a heavy emphasis on safety and campus life. After taking the health, ethics, and current events course, students will create habits and practice the skills needed for ethical reasoning and decision making. Each student will learn to distinguish what is right, what is wrong, what is best, and what the difference is between the three.
