Overview

hand on scale Over the last three years, Keystone Science School (KSS) and the National Consortium for Specialized Secondary Schools of Mathematics, Science and Technology (NCSSSMST) have developed and conducted three successful Keystone Center Youth Policy Summit programs. These summits, addressing the topics of Sustainable Energy as it relates to Transportation and Childhood and Adolescent Nutrition, involved 40 students from 10 NCSSSMST schools each year.

Following months of technical preparation and consultation with experts nationwide, the students meet in Keystone, Colorado for a one-week Youth Policy Summit from June 16-23, 2007. Keystone Science School's Youth Policy Summit provides students training on technical issues, negotiation, and problem solving while also providing a place for sharing research on various sides of the contentious issue and collaborating with their peers. The students then participate in a simulated negotiation between “representatives” of various critical stakeholder groups. Through their negotiations, the students create innovative policy recommendations that are forwarded to the President, members of Congress, government agencies and thought leaders in the industrial and non-profit sectors. The recommendations from the most recent 2006 Summit on Childhood and Adolescent Nutrition in America’s Schools can be found at in the final report.

Building on the history of these successful programs, KSS and NCSSSMST will conduct a fourth annual Youth Policy Summit on Obesity in America in 2007. Forty students from 10 different NCSSSMST schools from around the nation will be selected to participate in this program. The 2007 Youth Policy Summit on Obesity in America will address the fact that many Americans do not maintain healthy diets or adequate levels of physical activity, leading to increasing incidence of overweight and obesity despite the availability of information about healthy lifestyles. The summit seeks to build on the Summits of the prior two years while sharpening the focus on identifying evidence-based strategies for changing behavior. We would like the students to focus on identifying promising means of reducing overweight and obesity in the United States, targeting three population segments: children, ages 2-11; teens, ages 12-18; and adults, ages 19 and older.

Students will be asked to consider challenges and solutions along a three-part continuum of behavior change:

Information (what do people need to know and do they have access to it?)
Education (how can they learn to use the information appropriately?)
Inspiring action (what will motivate people to act on what they know?)

Having information does not mean a person knows what to do with it, and being educated in its use does not mean it will be acted upon. We would like students to analyze barriers to behavior change (e.g., emotional and psychological factors, time scarcity, language barriers, access to healthy foods, cost, community safety concerns), and to outline the highest priority strategies for each of the population segments mentioned above.

Man serving pizza Priority information about weight management needs to be conveyed to members of society in effective ways. A great deal of information regarding physical activity, nutrition, wellness and obesity prevention, is already available to consumers, through marketing (both commercial and social), food labeling, school wellness programs, educational curricula, and community/public health initiatives. We want students to assess how information is disseminated, to analyze some of the current educational methods used to teach the public about healthy lifestyles, and to determine how effective these methods are. Through analysis of current approaches, they will gain insight that will help them to recommend methods that should be used to educate the three population segments of the public about the information that all citizens should be aware of in order to decrease the number of obese and overweight individuals in the population.

Lastly, we want students to recommend strategies for motivating greater numbers of consumers to act upon the knowledge they have in order to manage weight effectively. Recommendations may focus on one part of the information-education-action continuum, may combine parts or may emphasize one over the others. The students will be free to direct recommendations toward any target audience, including government policy-makers, industry, educators, advocacy organizations, media, parent groups, youth-serving organizations, or individual consumers. The goal of the program is to complete the circle between knowledge and action, in the hope of improving the overall quality of life for today’s students and tomorrow’s society.