Episode Details

Anthony Godfrey:
Hello and welcome to the Supercast. I'm your host, Superintendent Anthony Godfrey. School is out for the summer, and that means kids will be having fun with friends, staying up late, sleeping in, taking trips and often enjoying some fun foods and a different diet. On this episode of the Supercast, we sit down with members of the Jordan School District Health and Wellness Team to find out how we can keep kids on track by following a few health and wellness tips for a happier summer with family and friends.

Anthony Godfrey:
We're back in our little studio here in Jordan School District Offices. We haven't been here since the start of the pandemic and it feels really good to be here. What better way to kick things off than to talk with McKinley Withers and Rachel Dangerfield from our Wellness Team and it's summer. We made it to summer 2021, which is very exciting. I recently read an article about a bird called the swift. And a swift, they now have the technology where they can put a little camera and a little altimeter on the bird and they can tell kind of the flight patterns and the swift flies for ten months without landing. Ten straight months without landing, and I think we all feel a little bit like a swift right now. We haven't landed for a long time, so it's good to finally have a summer where we can land and take a little bit of a breather.

There is summer school going on, but hopefully everyone can get a little bit of a break. We're here to talk with McKinley and Rachel about how to get the best break possible over the summer. How to really be focused on social, emotional wellness. I think there's going to be a level of freedom that students are experiencing that maybe we haven't had before with the transmission lower in the county than it's been for a very long time, with the mask requirement lifted, and with some opportunity to socialize now returning. Let's talk about some of those tips for social, emotional wellness. You always give us great advice. It's great to have you both here.

McKinley:
Well, we are so grateful to be here, and as fellow swifts making our way through this. So we are just so thrilled to be here and grateful for the chance that we have to connect with you, and reconnect with the parents that are out there. And one of the things that we've been talking about in our work with students and fellow educators, in the wake of this pandemic, as swifts who have just been kind of surviving and hanging on, just making it through, we want to be very thoughtful about approaching changes with the mindset of working on gains and not recognizing gaps. So what I mean by this is that the little victories are actually really big. We want to just make small bits of progress, rather than acknowledge what big differences or gaps may exist because of this altered lifestyle.

Anthony Godfrey:
And they certainly do exist.

McKinley:
They do.

Anthony Godfrey:
But we tend to focus too much on the losses and not enough on the gains.

McKinley:
Yes. And so what that looks like when we're trying to identify, is some small opportunities for gains, rather than gaps. There are a lot of strategies we can kind of talk through and hit. But the biggest one is the continued practice of gratitude. So it's okay to acknowledge that times are hard and to get through the difficult times and see those difficult struggles, but it's also okay to re