This week in Virginia, students, teachers, early childhood educators, staff, and administrators are promoting healthy hydration in schools to increase students’ water consumption as a measure to prevent obesity. This effort is part of Rev Your Bev Week, a statewide week of action put forth by Rev Your Bev, the Virginia Foundation for Healthy Youth’s (VFHY) campaign. The campaign aims to promote water and its vital role in student health and wellness and support Virginia schools in maintaining a positive, healthy learning environment.
During the week of action, Rev Your Bev and Y Street, VFHY’s statewide youth-led high school program, are engaging schools and students from PreK-12 in fun activities. This includes disseminating 500 kits with interactive hydration lessons developed by early childhood educators across the state and hosting school events to raise awareness and make healthy hydration part of students’ everyday lives through policy change. As a resource, the Rev Your Bev campaign developed comprehensive policy standards that school divisions can adopt to help increase water access and promotion in school. So far, 13 divisions, such as Richmond Public Schools, Henrico County Public Schools, Virginia Beach City Public Schools, and Greensville County Public Schools, have updated their wellness policy to include the campaign’s standards and partnered with Rev Your Bev. As a result, 245,478 students are covered under policy revisions that empower them to develop and sustain healthy hydration behaviors that will last a lifetime. Schools’ participation in Rev Your Bev Week will help bolster the campaign and Y Street’s advocacy efforts to inspire more school divisions to update their School Wellness Policy and increase the number of Virginia students learning and growing in environments powered by water.
Briana Moran, a Y Street member and student at Greensville High School, shared, “The campaign is important to me because I’m involved with a variety of extracurricular activities, so being able to have healthy drinking water is very beneficial.” VFHY Executive Director Marty Kilgore expressed her excitement regarding the impact of Rev Your Bev Week. “VFHY loves celebrating Rev Your Bev every year and supporting Y Street youth in their own efforts of empowering themselves and their peers to make healthy choices.”
To learn more about Rev Your Bev Week and the Rev Your Bev campaign, visit revyourbev.com.
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About the Virginia Foundation for Healthy Youth (VFHY)
Established in 1999 by the Virginia General Assembly, the Virginia Foundation for Healthy Youth empowers Virginia’s youth to make healthy choices by reducing and preventing youth tobacco and nicotine use, substance use, and childhood obesity.
VFHY takes a comprehensive approach to prevention work that includes reaching about 50,000 children each year through classroom-based prevention programs in public schools, after-school programs, community centers, daycares, and prevention programs across the state. VFHY’s award-winning marketing campaigns deliver prevention messaging to more than 500,000 children annually. In addition, VFHY’s research program provides scientific insight into methods to effectively reduce tobacco use. Since 2002, VFHY has funded 40 large research projects at universities throughout Virginia. For more information, visit www.vfhy.org.
