Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC), collaborating with Medgar Evers College School of Nursing, City University of New York, and New York City School District 19 of East New York, Brooklyn, proposes to design, implement, and evaluate a health education-community service program aimed at helping inner-city young adolescents adopt and maintain health- promoting cognitive and behavioral patterns. Building on a strategy developed and used successfully by school staff and community nurses in East New York, the program has two mutually reinforcing, components: (1) a classroom-based health instruction intervention, led by school staff and enhanced by nurses and nursing students; and (2) a community service intervention in which adolescents spend several hours each week working with nurse-mentors and providing service in health settings, such as nursing homes, clinics, and day care centers. Approximately 1,700 seventh- and eighth-grade students at one treatment and one control middle school will be enrolled in the study. Over three years, our specific aims are to: 1. Develop and implement a comprehensive health instruction and community service program for inner-city, highly vulnerable middle school students (grades 7 and 8), which defines and enhances the roles of nurses in adolescent health promotion; 2. Evaluate the impact of this program on young adolescents' health- promoting knowledge, attitudes, cognitive skills, and behaviors; 3. Evaluate the effects of this program within groups of African American and Hispanic male and female adolescents, and within groups at high and low initial risk, in order to identify factors that improve the effectiveness of interventions with specific subgroups; 4. Evaluate the extent to which the program provides nurses with knowledge and skills in adolescent health promotion; and, 5. Develop and evaluate a strategy for integrating community-based adolescent health promotion into nursing education, which can be disseminated to other schools of nursing interested in similarly expanding their efforts.
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