Sherburne County Health & Human Services (HHS) is helping make sure kids are staying healthy, physically and mentally.

During a community health board update last week, Community Health Service Administrator Amanda Larson and Public Health Nurse Windsong Larson spoke about the county’s Child and Teen Checkup (C&TC) Outreach Program. 

C&TC is Minnesota’s early screening, diagnostic and treatment program for kids from birth through 20 years old who are on Medical Assistance (MA) or MinnesotaCare. 

“It connects people with local healthcare providers to receive child checks and other preventative screening,” said Amanda Larson.

She said HHS had been focusing on the very young and early childhood kids.

“But two years ago we started looking at who is on MA, and the largest subset of folks on MA are adolescents,” she said.

“When we recognized that we needed more touch with our adolescents, I reached out to the Big Lake Schools and asked if we could do some partnering with some education with our adolescents,” said Windsong. 

“Fortunately, we were able to start a program in the high school that we call Lunchroom Topics.”

She and other nursing students go to the school and interact with the adolescents over all three lunch periods.

“Every month we have a new topic that we are approved by the school board to do,” she said. “Last year and this year included mental health.” One event that was popular with the adolescents was the self-care board, where each adolescent got a chance to write something they did for self-care.

“So we had a nice, big beautiful board in the hallway for them to write on,” she said.  “And it was really fun for them.”

The nurses also used games like Plinko to draw kids’ attention to educate them about sexually-transmitted disease and infection prevention. 

“We have to get them over to us using anything that is fun and creative - lots of trivia,” she said. “When they’re with their friends, they like to know everything.” 

They also we had a session on tobacco and vaping education. 

“It is a very hot topic this upcoming year,” she said. “We have some other things in the works for that as well.”

They also encouraged participation in physical activity by giving the kids different ideas. 

“We were educating them on how long they should be participating in physical activity and giving them disherent alternatives,” she said. “We also talked about healthy eating.”

HHS  reached out to Open Doors for Youth,  a resource center in Elk River that deals with homelessnesss.

“They brought in their therapy dog,” she said.

So far the program for adolescents is focused in Big Lake Schools, but Larson said that could change.

“This upcoming year we’re reaching out to a couple of other schools in Elk River, hoping we can expand that as well.”