School health and nutrition services

These services have been developed in different ways around the globe, but the fundamentals are constant: the early detection, correction, prevention or amelioration of disease, disability and abuse from which school aged children can suffer.

On this basis various social organizations demanded an appropriation from the city of $100,000 for more effective medical aid to the school children, contending that more than half of the extra expense could thus be saved.

Central guidelines are provided by Making Health Academic but each state and within that each school board has adopted its own specific methods.

The project is built around the fact that six preventable behaviours, mainly learned in childhood and youth, account for most of the serious illnesses and premature deaths in the United States.

In the United States, medical inspection in schools was first instituted in New York City in 1892, then in Boston in 1894, in Chicago in 1895, and in Philadelphia in 1898.