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Schools

Gemini Junior High Honored for Health Education

Classes cover topics including nutrition, pregnancy prevention, alcohol and drug abuse.

health teachers Marge Melfi and Melissa Phillips got a chance to show off their award-winning curriculum to the East Maine Elementary District 63 school board this month.

The school’s health program has been recognized for the second time by the Illinois School Health Association and the Illinois Association of Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance.

Gemini principal Scott Hermann said schools are required to cover more than 40 topics in health education, including everything from nutrition to sexually transmitted diseases to internet safety.

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Earlier:

Among the curriculum components that are most effective are a unit on eating disorders and how they affect the body as well as a project requiring students to create a truth-telling advertising campaign for the effects of tobacco. Another includes making stress balls during a unit that discusses healthy and unhealthy ways to address stress.

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As Melfi made the presentation, wailing from the hallway distracted board members. It was not coming from an infant whose distress had pulled a parent out of the meeting, but it was coming from two “Baby Think it Over” dolls that Melfi’s husband was trying to quiet. The dolls are used as part of the school’s pregnancy prevention program.

The dolls go home with Gemini eighth graders, who must care for them like real babies. And like real babies, they need to be fed, changed, burped and rocked, they even wake up and need attention during the night, Melfi said. A sensor in the doll recognizes a wristband that the student wears so the doll cannot be passed off to a friend to watch. Another sensor records all interactions and generates a grade for the student.

“We’re the only middle school I know that are doing this,” Melfi said.

The school also has several pairs of glasses that are meant to simulate the impairment of someone with a blood alcohol level of .08, the legal limit for driving in Illinois.

“For our students, that’s not many drinks,” Melfi noted.

Students wear them and attempt a variety of tasks, from walking a straight line to throwing a ball at a target.

When those trying to walk straight inevitably veer to the side, Melfi said, teachers tell them they could have just caused a head-on collision, or killed a mother and her children walking along the side of the road.

School board president Jane Wojtkiewicz – who did not wear the glasses but did hold one of the dolls – commended the teachers for their work teaching students to be safe and healthy.

“My mom once said she didn’t envy me raising a child in this day and age,” she said. “That scared me a little. But parents have you to help.”

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