Empowering Students to Move, Learn, and Thrive: Health and Wellness Education That Sticks Across Alberta, classrooms are reaching a critical tipping point. Teachers are seeing the impact of learned inactivity, rising stress, and declining focus. Anxiety, emotional dysregulation, and suboptimal academic performance are becoming the new normal — symptoms of a larger health crisis that begins long before adulthood. The reality is sobering: 40% of today’s graduating students are projected to prematurely develop late-onset diabetes, and 60% will be diagnosed as pre-diabetic in their forties — all due to lifestyle patterns acquired and entrenched during their years in grade school. These outcomes are not inevitable; they are addressable and preventable.Through the Healthy Habits Start Here® initiative, we’ve built something far more powerful than traditional health education — a complete, field-tested behaviour-change ecosystem grounded in 29 validated Behaviour Change Techniques (BCTs). Developed within education, and refined with educators, transforming K-12 wellness learning from passive knowledge into measurable, lasting action that reaches beyond the classroom, at home where real lifestyle change has to happen.We don’t just help kids move more — we help them own their health journey.
