Yell County residents aren’t as healthy as they could be, but a community group is working hard to change that.
Nurse practitioner Cynthia Day of Danville needed a project to achieve her doctorate, and she knew obesity was the issue she wanted to address.
When she looked at a community-health needs assessment conducted by Chambers Memorial Hospital in Danville, her employer, she saw state and Yell County statistics.
The numbers weren’t good.
“Arkansas ranked first in the nation in obesity when I started this; this year, we moved to sixth. Unfortunately, though, in those same stats, Yell County went up 2 percent [in obesity],” she said.
The obesity rate went from 35 percent in 2016 to 37 percent in 2017, according to national data, Day said.
Day and others contacted community stakeholders soon afterward to make them more aware of the problem and to ask for their help.
In September 2016, Day started a Healthy Active Yell Committee that comprises representatives of the county’s four school districts — Danville, Dardanelle, Two Rivers and Western Yell County — along with those from the Arkansas Department of Health, the Yell County Health Department, the Arkansas Tech University Department of Nursing, business owners and more.
“Our ultimate goal is really to create a healthier, more active Yell County,” Day said. “We have some real specific goals, but with it being a large-population project like this, it’s going to take 10 years to start seeing a real difference.”
Making changes in the community is part of the goal. For example, Day said, the only farmers market was in Dardanelle. Because of the work of the committee, a farmers market will open June 3 in Danville.
“Yell County extension agents have been a huge part of what we’re doing,” she said.
Each school district is required by law to have a wellness committee, so Day said her committee tries to attend those meetings to stay in the loop with what the schools are doing.
“What we’re hearing is there’s not a lot of outreach to the community or parents themselves; we’re trying to fill that void,” she said.
The Healthy Active Yell Committee held a contest among students in all four school districts to create a logo to represent Healthy Active Yell County.
“We wanted something to really kind of brand what we were doing, but we really wanted something specific to Yell County,” Day said.
Danville High School sophomore Ivan Oblea’s logo won first place, and Gov. Asa Hutchinson came to the school earlier this month to announce the winner.
Oblea, 16, smiled as his name was called.
“I thought somebody else would win; I didn’t expect to win myself,” he said. The logo was a tree, “and I put people around the tree and put an apple in it to show healthiness.”
He said the governor told him, “Good job.”
Jenni Phomsithi, instructional facilitator for the Danville School District, is a member of the Healthy Active Yell Committee.
She said the logo will be used on social media and Facebook.
“We’re planning for things like glow runs in the fall,” she said, and the logo will be on T-shirts and water bottles and “whatever we hand out.”
Phomsithi said it was exciting to have the governor visit the school because teachers and staff got to show off other areas and projects of which they are proud.
“We were super excited because we got to show him all the things we’ve done to increase student health and community health,” she said. “A lot of projects we’ve done, including the fitness center, are open to the community.”
The Danville School District has focused on improving the health of its students and residents for a while. Phomsithi wrote and received a $100,000 grant in 2015 to create the Living Positively Fitness Center at S.C. Tucker Elementary School.
The district also received a $30,000 joint-use grant in early 2016 from the Arkansas Department of Education’s Coordinated School Health Office. The district partnered with the city to open an outdoor fitness center at the Danville City Park, which is less than a mile from the school.
It’s open 24/7, she said.
“We have 19 pieces of equipment, some of which will allow multiple users at once. The equipment includes ellipticals, bikes, climbing pieces, leg presses, strength/stretch bars and more,” she said.
Phomsithi said that every time she drives by, people of all ages and ethnicities are using the equipment.
“The project is doing just what it was intended to do, which is provide a free place for everyone to exercise in hopes of reducing the overweight and obese population in our schools and community,” she said.
Phomsithi is also writing a $150,000 grant, which is due in July, to replace water fountains in the Yell County schools with water-bottle-filling stations.
“We focused on the exercise a lot,” but she said Day found out in her surveys that “students are still eating poorly and bringing sodas for lunch.” Danville doesn’t sell soft drinks, but Phomsithi said some schools in the county do.
The idea is to get students to bring their own water bottles, “and kids like the novelty of filling them up,” she said.
Day called Phomsithi “an excellent grant-writer.”
“We really wanted to address sugar-sweetened beverages with the kids,” Day said. “That was part of this grant. If you can get people used to drinking water, if it gets to be a habit, it will continue into the home life.”
Whatever it takes to help Yell County students and adults get healthy, the women said, they’re willing to try.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.