The purpose of this study was to analyze and assess the current situation of Korea's school health education program and to establish measures to efficiently carry out school health education in Korea.

The survey was conducted through the internet with the health educators of elementary, middle, and high schools nationwide to assess the current condition of school health education programs, and 2,459 samples were collected which accounted for 23.4% of the total respondents.

According to school health educators on the enforcement of health education, the higher the education became, the less the health education was enforced. The enforcement rate was 96.9% in elementary schools, 76.7% in middle schools, and 67.3% in high schools. The major reasons were found as difficulty in securing class time (54.5%) and other excessive workloads (20.9%). As a result of the health education awareness survey, over 99% answered that health education is needed, over 80% answered that the education requires independent health textbooks, and over 95% answered that health educators are suitable for the person in charge of the education.

This study will be a useful in establishing a detailed policy on enhancing school health education in the future.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of a school-based intervention program for middle school adolescent girls with depression.

The study was a pretest–posttest repeated-measure design with a nonequivalent control group. Fifty eight students with depressive symptoms were recruited from two middle schools in Seoul, Korea. The data were collected from the intervention (n= 30) and the comparison group (n= 28). The research instrument was Reynolds Adolescent Depression Scale.

The intervention group greatly improved from baseline to 10 weeks and then saw a slight positive change between 10 and 13 weeks.

The results of this research show that depression intervention programs are effective for young female adolescents. Thus the investigation has important school-based treatment implications, and should be integrated into school curriculums by school health nurses for early intervention of depressive symptoms in middle school adolescent girls.

The study was conducted to describe body shapes of school age children using the degree of obesity index (DOI) and body mass index obesity index classified by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (M-BOI) and Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education (S-BOI).

In this cross sectional descriptive study health screening data for school children collected in 2007 was used.

Data were analyzed for 2,193 4th-6th grade boys (52%) and girls who attended 4 schools in rural areas. DOI determined that only 44.3% of students had average weight. This proportion was much lower than the results of other methods (74.3-77.6%). All three methods defined girls (51.3-61.8%) as skinnier than boys. Skinny and average body shaped children classified by DOI and obese children classified by S-BOI were heavier and taller and presented higher degrees of obesity (DO) and BMI scores than by other methods. M-BOI and S-BOI presented statistically significant positive correlations with weight, height, DO and BMI, while DOI was not correlated with height.

BMI based body shape classifications provide a more rigorous classification of body shape which are favorable for school health professionals with limited resources and policy makers for internationally comparable references.