Covid 19: Creating a Culture of Trust in Casey County

Faculty and school personnel are expected to support the children in school, however, their level of stress during COVID-19 is greatly impacted their ability to do their work. They regularly put themselves and their families at risk due to the essential work they do. The stress of potentially being exposed to COVID-19 concomitantly with the stress of uncertainty related to preparing for in-person, virtual, and hybrid learning is high. School systems are uniquely poised to change the culture of health because faculty and school personnel trusted community members. Currently, misinformation and polarizing attitudes towards science and health are a threat to the health of communities. Our proposal combines a healthy support and gratitude care package for faculty and school personnel, including food service and custodial staff, at Walnut Hill Elementary School (WHE) with a social media campaign that encourages sharing healthy activities suggested within the care package using the hashtag #caseyhealth. The messages will be a combination of social support messages around health, gratitude, and optimism. The clinical scholars team seeks to providing school personnel with social support messages that include health messages that support stress reduction. These messages seek to improve knowledge and trust of general health topics such as eating healthy, reducing tobacco use, physical activity, and stress reduction through meditation. The care package will include items that can be used for health-related activities (description below). Insights from our communications with WHE partners suggests that the community will need a long-term strategy for building trust in science and health information. By providing a social support care package with health education messages, we hope to strengthen our collaboration and relationship with school personnel. The goal of the project is to increase overall knowledge on health and wellness topics in the community. A secondary purpose is to continue building trust with the community by supporting a group of essential workers facing a stressful work environment due to COVID-19. The information we learn from the social media hashtag engagement is to examine what health-related behaviors school personnel from WHE engage in during a social media campaign. The types of activities will provide our team with a deeper understanding the types of activities that are perceive to be healthy. This will provide us with insights regarding engaging the community in a culture of health in the Clinical Scholars Wicked Problem Impact Project.