PTO Today

Is your group — like so many others — putting a focus these days on keeping children healthy? From exercise (and eating right) to the H1N1 virus to cough and cold and even to hand-washing, there are just so many concerns these days that affect our kids’ health.

It’s been interesting to watch so many groups getting proactive on the issue. Groups are spearheading flu clinics at school and hosting family events around healthy habits. Two great volunteers at my school just put together a weeklong health and wellness program, including a blood drive, pilates in the classrooms, and a road race. Love it.

With that in mind, we’ve recently put together a new dedicated space on ptotoday.com just about what groups are doing about Healthy School Kids. It’s already a nice resource and will get better each month as we add even more of the best ideas we find from parent groups around the country. And — bonus! — we also expect to have a whole host of free offers (samples and the like) from health-focused companies available for “Healthy School Kids” groups, starting in the next month or two. Check it out now (and preregister your group) at ptotoday.com/healthy-school-kids.

So did you know that today was International Walk to School Day?  I did a quick scan on the net to see if there were any articles or blogs about schools participating. There were tons! Great to see.

Loved reading about what one PTO is doing to celebrate Walk-to-School Day.  Not only do they do some fun things to promote this day but they also have a  PTO walk-to-school coordinator for the whole school year.

Is your PTO involved in any programs that encourage healthy habits in the students at your school? We’d love to hear what you’re doing!

Wanted to call your attention to PTO Today’s newest program, Healthy School Kids. You can find a link to the Healthy School Kids (HSK) sign-up page on ptotoday.com in the main navigation bar, under Helpful Tools.

This is a great program for parent groups who are trying to mix healthy habits into fundraising and school family events.

By signing up to become a HSK group, you’ll get:

1) Priority notice for FREE Healthy School Kids sample offers to share with parents at upcoming school events (you”ll also be one of the first to be emailed of any health and wellness free samples offers that come up throughout the year – i.e. hand sanitizer samples for an upcoming fitness night, healthy snack samples for Family Reading Night, etc.)

2) Immediate access to a special HSK home page web page on ptotoday.com, which features all of our best health and wellness PTO content. We’ll be adding more content to this page each month.

So go check it out and tell us what you think.