How Garfield, New Jersey, Got its Kids Moving More and Eating Better

How Garfield, N.J., Got Its Kids
Moving More and Eating Better
A Case Study - 2008
Active Living Resource Center • www.activelivingresources.org • Page 1

How Garfield, NJ Got Its Kids Moving
And Eating Better
Garfield is a small city in Bergen County, New Jersey that has made big
steps towards creating an active, healthy community. A collaboration
of Garfield’s local government, schools, the local Y, the parks and recre-ation
department and area higher education institutions—all coordinated
by the Garfield health department—has been working since 2005 to create
opportunities for Garfield’s children and families to be more physically
active and eat more healthily.
This is the story of how Garfield has
done it.
Concern for Children’s
Health Inspires the City
Council to Act
Garfield’s campaign to create an ac-tive,
healthy community began
when Mayor Calandriello, City Manager
Thomas J. Duch and Darleen Reveille,
R.N., public health nurse for Garfield, at-tended
a meeting of the New Jersey May-ors’
Wellness Campaign in early spring
2005. The Mayors’ Wellness Campaign
aims to equip New Jersey’s mayors and other key leaders with the tools to
develop and implement active-living initiatives in their communities with
the ultimate goal of improving health and reducing the health care costs
that come with the obesity problem in New Jersey.
In late spring 2005, in light of what the mayor and the city manager
had learned at the meeting, the City Council requested Reveille to pull
together the “Childhood Obesity Intervention Task Force,” which she
did, along with colleague Kathleen M. Burke, Ph. D., assistant dean in
charge of nursing at nearby Ramapo College of New Jersey. The two
brought together a broad coalition of health, education and community
development professionals from public and private sector organizations
from throughout Bergen County, including:
• Garfield school system
• Garfield YMCA
• Garfield park and recreation department
• Garfield Boys and Girls Club
• Ramapo College of New Jersey
• Hackensack Medical Center
• William Paterson University
• North Hudson Community Action Corporation
Photos by Mark Plotz, NCBW
Photo above: Fifth grad-ers
from PS#7 demonstrate
where a bike rack should be
placed -- on a very visible
space in front of the school.

The task force’s first action was to ask a team of
nursing students from Ramapo College to conduct a
community health assessment of Garfield. The nursing
students conducted the assessment as part of their work
for a community health course. Burke supervised the
students.
As part of their assessment, the nursing students
measured the body-mass index (a measure of body fat)
of all Garfield’s fifth and sixth grade students, with
the permission of the school system and parents. The
nursing students discovered that the group of Garfield
students they measured was more obese on average than
children in other New Jersey communities.
(The nursing students also identified three other priority
health concerns during their assessment:
• The need for Spanish interpreters in city facilities.
• Limited access to health care.
• Increasing rates of domestic violence.)
The city council invited the nursing students to present
their findings during the council’s May 2005 meeting.
“The fact that the whole council listened to the students’
presentation on the health assessment at one of their
regular meetings says something about the involvement
of Garfield’s leadership right from the start,” observed
Burke.
The outcome of the presentation was that Garfield
signed on to the Mayors’ Wellness Campaign, making
an official commitment to create a more active, healthier
community, especially for children.
The Task Force Works to Improve Chil-dren’s
Health—and Becomes FUN
Two private sector partners—the managed health care
insurers Amerigroup NJ and Horizon New Jersey
Health—and the New Jersey Department of Health and
Senior Services funded the Childhood Obesity Interven-tion
Task Force’s very first initiative, a community health
resource guide that was printed and distributed via Gar-field’s
schools and city agencies.
Reveille and Burke hoped task force members could
work together to create a pilot program to increase
physical activity and promote healthier eating for kids in
Garfield. They hoped, too, that Garfield could identify
some best practices to help fight childhood obesity that
might even be shared with other communities in New
Jersey. “We knew the problem,” said Reveille, “what
we needed was to create interventions.”
Garfield: A small city with a diverse
population and some unusual assets.
With some 30,000 residents, an area of only 2.2 square
miles and a long history (it was originally a settlement
of the Leni Lenape, a Native American people), Garfield
is a densely populated, traditionally-built New Jersey
city. That is to say, the entire city consists of mixed
used neighborhoods where residents can easily walk
to schools, places of worship, shops and other frequent
destinations. Almost no street is wider than two lanes,
reducing the amount of high speed traffic and making
streets amenable to crosswalks.
Garfield also represents demographically the face of New
Jersey—one of the nation’s most ethnically diverse states.
Children in the schools come from families speaking
some 66 languages, according to Frank Calandriello,
Mayor of Garfield. Among these languages are Spanish,
Polish, Italian, Russian, Macedonian, Korean, Hindi,
Croatian and Arabic.
Many of Garfield’s residents are working class who have
recently immigrated or arrived in earlier generations
to work in the town’s textile and paper mills. Most
of those mills have closed, including the recycling
company Garden State Paper, leaving some 100 various
enterprises. Average per capita income in Garfield,
according to the 2000 census, was $19,530, contrasting
with the statewide average of $40,455.
Garfield is both an Abbott and Urban Aid school district,
meaning that the schools receive extra funding from the
state to help improve school facilities and educate the
many students from low-income families.
Despite economic challenges, Garfield is in many ways
fortunate, according to Joanne Wendolowski, R.N., B.C.,
M.S., Public Health Nurse Supervisor at Hackensack
Medical Center, one of Garfield’s main health care
providers. She noted the strong sense of community in
Garfield and the habit that local organizations already
have of working together. The public health department
is well-respected, she said, giving their efforts weight and
credibility.
But most important, said Wendolowski, is that the public
health department takes a broad, activist view of its
role in the community. “The public health department
really understands that their role is to make sure their
community is a place where people can be healthy.”
Also, for a city its size, Garfield is unusually rich in open
space—most families can walk to one of Garfield’s nine
parks within five or 10 minutes. The city has several
local organizations that can provide opportunities to
be physically active including a YMCA, a community
recreation center and a Boys and Girls Club.

Reveille quickly understood that the first thing to do was to name the task force’s initiative something
that might appeal to and engage all residents of Garfield. “We are a very diverse community and
everyone needs to see a piece of themselves in our program,” said Reveille.
So the task force named the initiative “Fitness, Unity, Nutrition”, or FUN. The word “unity” is
important, said Reveille, because task force members aim to bring the whole community together to
create healthier lifestyle habits.
Garfield’s Health Department and Schools Work Together to Create
Safe Routes to School
Through the Mayors’ Wellness Campaign, Reveille and city manager Duch learned about the federal
Safe Routes to School program and decided that enabling more children to walk to school safely
was a strategy that meshed well with the aims of FUN. The Safe Routes to School program provides
funds to the states to improve the ability of primary and middle school students to walk and bicycle to
school safely.
In late 2005, Garfield applied to participate in a three-day City Safe Routes to School workshop that
the Active Living Resource Center had designed especially for urban areas. The Active Living Re-source
Center provides information and resources to help individuals, neighborhood groups and com-munity
partnerships create communities that promote physical activity.
In part because the community was already mobilizing around children’s health through the F.U.N.
task force, the Active Living Resource Center selected Garfield’s school system for a workshop in
May 2006. The workshop brought
together teachers, parents, el-ementary
school students and a
variety of local leaders to assess
conditions for walking to school
and to develop local commitment
to making conditions better.
As a workshop activity, fourth
and fifth grade students and
teachers from Woodrow Wilson
#5 and Roosevelt #7 schools
walked the blocks around their
schools to identify danger spots
and suggest solutions to make the
routes safer for walking.
Then in 2007, Garfield became
one of 29 New Jersey commu-nities
to which the New Jersey
Department of Transportation
awarded a grant under the fed-eral
Photo: School dismissal at PS#7.
Safe Routes to School program. Garfield received $18,000 to launch “Get Up and Go” with the
“Newspaper in Education” project of the daily Bergen County newspaper, The Record.
“Get Up and Go” is an eight-part series of activities incorporating math, science, language arts and
other subjects that teachers can use in their classrooms to teach students how to safely walk to school.
Kids write stories about their walks to school or calculate their carbon footprints, that is, their person-al
impact on the environment. The series reached many more families than just those in Garfield: each
edition went out as an insert in the newspaper to the 30,000 subscribers to The Record.
Garfield’s Safe Routes to School campaign has many facets and has expanded to ten elementary and

middle schools, explained Reveille. Among the ongoing activities are:
• Walking clubs at elementary schools #5 and #7 where kids walk during the school day and
engage in special projects such as holiday food drives.
• Walking school buses once a month where parent volunteer “walking bus drivers” stop at the
houses of some 100 kids to pick them up and safely walk them in a group to school.
• Walking events a couple of times a year that the schools publicize through e-mails home and
flyers in students’ backpacks including International Walk to School Day.
In preparation for walking to school
each year, students and teachers at
elementary school #7 walk around the
area near the school. The school’s
principal, Margarita Pennisi, de-scribed
how kindergarten students and
first graders do an orientation walk
around the school building and the
older students—second through fifth
graders—walk the entire perimeter of
the school zone.
During these walks teachers review
safety concepts—being aware of
dogs, stopping and looking before
crossing streets—and encourage the
children to travel along more major
streets, avoid congested side streets
and strictly keep to sidewalks.
Photo: School crosswalk at PS#5.
The school finishes field day at the end of the school year with another perimeter walk to set the
students up for walking during the next school year.
Principal Pennisi believes the orientation walks help children become more aware of their surround-ings.
Still, change is happening only slowly. For example, students at #7 school were still not allowed to
ride their bikes to school as of fall 2008. Pennisi voiced her continuing concerns about the dangers
of letting children ride their bikes on Garfield’s congested, narrow streets.
Pennisi also perceived that although parents were more aware of the walking program, she had not
seen a big uptick in numbers of children walking to school. She estimated some 25 to 30 percent
continued to do so. For many parents, she said, it was still a matter of family convenience and
feeling secure about their children’s whereabouts. (Pennisi did say she thought more children were
walking home from school.)
Joanne Wendolowski, the public health nurse supervisor from Hackensack Medical Center, identi-fied
another source of resistance to the Safe Routes to School program: most parents believe that
walking and biking programs get imposed when the school district no longer wants pay for provid-ing
buses.
But Safe Routes to School champion Reveille has made it clear that walking and biking to school
are healthy behaviors for children. For their children’s health, says Reveille, parents must know
that “we need to promote more walking and biking to school.”
This new way of looking at community health may be helping to overcome parents’ resistance to
the Safe Routes to School program, said Wendolowski.

A Week-Long Summer Survival Camp in the Meadowlands Marsh
In May 2006, Reveille and task force member Kathy Burke from Ramapo College reached out to
another colleague on the task force, Angela Cristini, head of environmental education at Mead-owlands
Environmental Center. They hoped to develop more opportunities for Garfield’s kids to
stay active during the summer. Their resourcefulness paid off in the creation of the Ramapo and
Meadowlands Survival Camp—RAMS Camp—that helps keep Garfield’s kids moving and intel-lectually
stimulated for one week during the summer.
RAMS camp takes place at the environmental center, about a 15-minute bus ride from Garfield.
The camp’s goal, according to the camp brochure, is “for students to learn to prepare themselves
in the best ways to survive in any environment – from the Marsh – to School – to Home.” That
means children will learn how to feed themselves nutritious food and condition their bodies for
“any challenges that may arise.”
The camp is free and transportation is provided. Grants from the New Jersey Department
of Health and Senior Services’ Leaders’ Academy program (to support community-based
physical activity initiatives) helped partially fund the camp during 2006 and 2007. A grant from
Amerigroup Community Care – the health care insurer – helped support the 2008 session.
During the camp session, camp staff – Cristini and other counselors, including LaSpisa from the
Garfield YMCA – divide the campers into teams. At the end of the week, members of the team
with the highest number of “survival” points receive prizes such as gift certificates from local
businesses, binoculars and sports
equipment.
Cristini described some of the kids’
favorite camp activities:
• The “What’s in Your Food?” lab
that teaches them how to analyze
whether foods contain proteins,
fats, carbohydrates and sugar. The
campers separate into groups at
tables where each table has five
samples of mystery food and
equipment to analyze the samples.
(Camp staffers chose tuna in oil,
chicken in water, white grape juice,
saltines and vegetable oil.) With
the help of an adult at each table,
the campers analyze the samples to
figure out the composition of the
samples. “The kids love it, they get
gloves and goggles and learn how
to measure and interpret data,” said
Cristini.
Photo: Garfield students enjoy the Ramapo & Meadow-lands
Survival Camp -- RAMS.
At the end of the lab, the campers write their results on the blackboard. The team that does the
best job determining what’s in the samples is the winner. Once the campers better understand
what foods are made of, Cristini conducts a lab to demonstrate how much fat is in a Big Mac and
how much sugar in a Slurpee. “That really shocks them,” said Cristini.
• The Botanical Challenge, where the campers roam the Meadowlands’ boardwalks to find
samples of three different types of marshland plants: edible plants, medicinal plants and plants
used for building shelters. As campers explore the terrain, taking pictures with digital cameras

and filling out their answer sheets, they not only learn about the environment of the marsh,
but also accumulate steps on their pedometers (a clip-on, watch-sized instrument that counts
steps)—and those add up to survival points for the end-of–the–week contest, too.
The campers also analyze the lunches that they bring from home to camp every day. Each day
at lunch time over the course of the week, campers write down what they’ve got in their lunch
bags, eat, and then “rate their plates.” That is, they figure out the serving size, number of
calories from fat and the amounts of sugar and sodium for all the items in their lunch.
Each day, a lunch table team captain makes a tally for his or her team. At the end of the
week, the team that wins this contest is the one whose members have collectively brought
lunches with the healthiest variety of foods, lowest amounts of sugar and sodium and fewest
calories from fat. As the week goes on, “the lunches do change,” observed Cristini “and we see
healthier foods like pretzels and yogurt, instead of potato chips and cookies”.
Campers also participate in relay races, and learn how to canoe and do yoga. Yoga is really
their favorite activity, reported Cristini.
Cristini at the Meadowlands and other professors from Ramapo College piloted RAMS Camp
in 2006. Twenty Garfield school teachers and nurses attended a first week-long session, and
then some 18 Garfield middle school students attended a second week-long session.
When Cristini and her camp team discovered that teachers were not able to incorporate as
many activities as they had hoped into their curricula during the school year, they decided
to offer the camp to kids only, and focused on expanding the number of kids who could
attend. Cristini also encouraged teachers who attended the original session to come back as
counselors.
In the summer of 2007 and again in 2008, a total of 80 middle schoolers who were
participating in the summer sessions of Garfield’s recreation center, YMCA and Boys and Girls
Club attended the camp.
Plans are to hold the camp again in the summer of 2009, although as of January 2009 Reveille
reported they had not identified funding.
Source: CDC/NCHS, NHES and NHANES

Walking to School from Before-School Care at
the YMCA
The F.U.N. initiative created another opportunity for Gar-field
kids to walk, sparked by the Safe Routes to School
project: Sal LaSpisa, the school-aged child care director at
the YMCA, decided to see if the children in the Y’s before-school
care could walk to school. The Y’s before-school care
program covers Garfield elementary schools #4, #5 and #8.
Typically, parents dropped their children off at 7:30 a.m.
and then, at 8:15 a.m., the kids got on a bus to go to school.
When LaSpisa proposed the idea of walking to school and
sent out a release form to parents, parents were extremely
resistant. “Their Number One concern was safety,” said
LaSpisa, but they were also worried about the distance and
the strain of the book bags on their children’s backs.
LaSpisa persisted with his efforts, though, and in fall 2007
started the walking program twice per week. Each group of
children—about 15--walked with two Y counselors, leaving
at about 8:00 a.m. and arriving at school about 25 minutes
later, in time for the 8:30 bell.
Photo: Students from PS#7 show the ALRC staff around
their school neighborhood.
The children were enthusiastic. LaSpisa reported that
the children really value the time they can spend with the
counselors along the way to school. “These small groups
are more intimate. The kids can tell us what’s on their mind
before the day begins. They can walk, reflect and calm
down before they get to school,” he explained.
The children now walk to school five days per week. Three
groups of about 15 kids (from kindergarten kids to sixth
graders) walk to their schools.
The YMCA has a bus in reserve to take the kids to school in
case of bad weather. “The kids are disappointed when they
can’t walk,” said LaSpisa. They ask the staff every morning
whether it’s a walking day.
Normally, he said, they walk to school from the beginning
Garfield Middle and High School
Students Map Their Community with
an Eye to Health
Since 2007, in a special initiative also supported
by the Safe Routes to School and Leaders
Academy funds, local middle and high school
students have been assessing and mapping the
conditions in their community for walking and
living a healthy lifestyle.
Working with Wansoo Im, Ph.D., a geographic
information systems (GIS) mapping expert from
the private firm VERTICES, L.L.C., the students
were developing an interactive map of safe and
attractive walking routes for Garfield. The city
bought laptop computers and digital cameras
so that students could walk around town and
document conditions for walking—beginning with
Safe Routes to School.
Wansoo is also an adjunct professor at Rutgers
University – the state university of New Jersey –
and his intern students volunteered to teach the
students the GIS mapping application.
This map (shown at the top of page 9) is
available at the Garfield FUN Web site. Reveille
hoped that parents of school-aged children – and
all Garfield residents – would be able to use the
map to create safe walking routes tailored to their
own itineraries from home to school or other local
destinations such as the YMCA.
Beginning in winter 2008, Wansoo and his interns
were also helping students to create a second
map to inventory all places in the community
where people could engage in healthy activities
including parks and recreation centers. Future
healthy places such as planned school and
community gardens were also to figure on the
map.
On December 30, 2008 six Garfield high school
students, several local volunteers, Wansoo
and his interns walked around the community
conducting the first audit of healthy community
assets. As measured by the pedometers they
were all wearing, group members walked on
average 1.86 miles and burned 191 calories.
Reveille reported that sites of Garfield’s Clean
Communities Program (a litter abatement and
environmental education program) would also be
mapped and that the city administration would be
able to use the map to identify problem areas.

A map from the Garfield F.U.N. web site; see sidebar on pg. 8 for more information
of the school year through October, and begin again by early March until school lets out for the
summer.
How did LaSpisa succeed in overcoming the parents’ strong resistance to the walking program?
First, he met with Reveille and the YMCA’s executive director. They decided to keep the walks.
“We needed to show people we were dedicated to the idea of healthy behaviors for kids. We
could have easily packed it in when parents were knocking down our doors,” said LaSpisa. But
the Y stuck with it, he said, and now he believes parents are starting to recognize the importance
of physical activity for their children’s health.
An added benefit, explained LaSpisa, is that walking “teaches kids safety…they’re not going to
be in a school bus all the time.”
Garfield Continues to Support Community Health
Support for “Fitness, Unity and Nutrition” appears to be embedded in Garfield. Government
continued its support: through city manager Duch, in 2006 Garfield applied for and won a
$25,000 grant from the New York Giants to build a family fitness path in a local park. The path was
completed in 2007 and the recreation center began using it for a “fitness challenge” during 2008
summer camp.
The city was also redeveloping its river front with New Jersey Green Acres funding. Plans
included a walking and biking trail along the river. Pilot programs were spreading to other local
agencies. For example, the Garfield Boys and Girls Club planned to start a walking school bus in
spring 2009 for the children in their before-school care program.

Although F.U.N. has yet to create formal benchmarks with which to evaluate its progress, Joanne
Wendolowski of Hackensack Medical Center said she detected a difference in people’s behavior
coming from Garfield’s efforts. “From my windshield survey,’ she said, “I can see that Garfield
is a more active place. They’ve taken all their open space and made it usable for families. People
are in the parks, people are out there walking…the healthy values are being integrated into the
recreation programming, you can see people out there using the facilities…”
What’s Next for Garfield?
Reveille and Burke noted that the FUN Task Force is one sustainable result of Garfield’s efforts.
That means a group of committed community leaders can continue to brainstorm ideas, seek
new partners and reach out for funding and support for health-promoting initiatives.
As of January 2009, FUN was developing partners in a new area--school gardens-- filled with
possibilities to promote better nutrition and physical activity.
Reveille saw an opportunity in the new Thomas Jefferson Middle School. According to Reveille,
this new facility, built with Abbott funds, had a “beautiful, new greenhouse, but no person to staff
it.” So Reveille reached out to middle school principal Marilyn Martorano to discuss how to build
healthy programming around the greenhouse.
With a master gardener from the 4-H Club
extension program at Rutgers University,
FUN and the schools developed a six-week
garden curriculum that will be integrated
into the middle school science curriculum.
The curriculum will teach middle-school
students such topics as how to grow food,
how to store food safely and nutritiously
through canning and freezing and the
components of good nutrition. The course
will culminate in a “Cook Off” (like
the Food Network’s “Iron Chef,” said
Reveille) in the school’s new life skills
classroom. A nutritionist from Hackensack
Medical Center will judge the competition.
The gardening course was scheduled to
begin on January 20, 2009.
At the request of Principal Martorano, a
“horticultural therapist” from Rutgers will
also create programming for special needs
kids including a work force component to
help them prepare for jobs in agriculture.
With typical resourcefulness, Reveille
Photo: Third graders from #5 school participate in
a walking audit of their school neighborhood with
ALRC staff.
made the case to the New Jersey Clean Communities program that the garden program
incorporates environmental education by teaching youth about healthy soil and good conditions for
plants. Clean Communities funding is helping support the consultants who will present the garden
curriculum to the science classes.
What’s more, the Garfield Clean Communities coordinator is now part of the F.U.N. task force.
Still, Reveille reflected that finding funding to support programming is a constant and ongoing
challenge. But she does not plan to give up. “I am passionate about this work” she reflected,

“because I spent most of my 30-year career in nursing in the field of Critical Care—I have wit-nessed
a lot of human suffering from chronic disease. We need to promote programs that can help
prevent chronic disease, like Safe Routes to School and FUN.”
Lessons Learned from the F.U.N. campaign
1. One committed person—a champion—can
catalyze community change, engage the
necessary partners and resources and sustain a
vision for change.
2. A broad-based community coalition is
necessary to bring in talent and resources over
the long run and to enable the implementation
of broad-based community change. Such a
coalition can also help sustain change.
3. Support of a community’s political leadership
is necessary to institutionalize change and find
permanent sources of staffing and funding.
4. Communities can seldom directly change the
behavior of community members: by changing
community environments—physical and
cultural—they can encourage desired behavior
change and make it easier for more people.
5. Communities must experiment with
programming to identify what works for the
members of their communities.
Photo: This map depicting some of the good and
bad aspects of life in Garfield was produced during
an ALRC City-SRTS workshop.
Sources of Grant Funding for Garfield’s FUN Initiative
Leaders Academy, from the New Jersey Depart-ment
of Health & Senior Services through the New
Jersey Council of Physical Fitness & Sports
2006: $ 2,500.00
2007: $10,000.00
National Football League Charities through the
New York Giants Football Team
2006: $25,000.00
New Jersey Safe Routes to School Program, from
the Federal SRTS program through the New Jersey
Department of Transportation
2007: $18,000.00
Amerigroup Community Care provided support for
the Ramapo and Meadowlands Survival Camp—
RAMS Camp
2008: $5,000.00
Horizon NJ Health provided support for community
health projects
2006: $5,000
Mayors Wellness Campaign provided seed money
to help Garfield launch a comprehensive wellness
program for the City.
2005: $500.00

Fifth grade school students from Garfield, New Jersey, are helping to make
healthy decisions about their community and their lives.
The Active Living Resource Center (ALRC) is a program managed by the National Center
for Bicycling and Walking (NCBW) and funded by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
The program provides technical resources and outreach programs to community activists
and grass roots groups seeking to increase walking and bicycling with a special emphasis
on creating opportunities for children in disadvantaged communities across the United
States. See our web site at: www.activelivingresources.org
www.activelivingresources.org
National Center for Bicycling & Walking
1612 K Street NW, Suite 802
Washington, DC 20006
Phone: 202.223.3621
e-mail: info@bikewalk.org

How Garfield, New Jersey, Got its Kids Moving More and Eating Better

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