What You Need to Know
A paper published by faculty from the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine in the journal Children, concludes its COVID Support Our Schools (SOS) program helped underserved communities at a critical time - and its benefits could help with community health outreach beyond the time of a pandemic.
COVID SOS was developed as part of the School’s Human Dimension course curriculum, which is focused on outreach into the community. COVID SOS aimed to provide expertise about opening, and opening safely, to select school districts in underserved communities that had previously partnered with the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine’s innovative Human Dimension program.
Each of the schools was paired with a Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine Support Our Schools Task Force consisting of eight medical students supervised by one of the School’s faculty physicians. Each Task Force was trained in the latest in COVID-19 research and developments. The members of each task force met with school leadership approximately once a month. Overall, the COVID SOS program reached 11 school districts and one Boys and Girls Club which totaled 138 individual schools from historically underserved areas across New Jersey.
Eighty-three percent of the school districts responded to a follow-up survey, with almost all scores in the 90th percentile.
About COVID SOS
In addition to a personalized task force, school districts had access to the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine Faculty COVID Advisory Board of 12 members, which hosted regular Q-and-A sessions as much as every week, depending on COVID trends of the time, in order to provide real-time support and weekly scientific updates.
COVID SOS assisted on topics such as:
- COVID-19 guidelines (overall)
- Staffing and operational challenges
- Child abuse and neglect during COVID-19
- Masking
- Planning for vaccinations
- Education disparities
- Unique challenges of Remote Learning
- Mental health impact of COVID-19 on communities