“I don’t want Savannah to go through what I’ve been through,” said Joe Ann Calvy of Eastover, SC. At 48, she has already had a heart attack. She said growing up “I didn’t know how to eat properly, and I’ve always had weight problems.”
This is one reason why she and her husband have been so supportive of Savannah’s after-school class on nutrition. The class is offered through a partnership between Prisma Health and SC DHEC. The educators use telehealth to teach the class remotely so that they can reach more children at once.
“If we were offering this content to one individual school, it would require a person to travel from one site to the other, and this is a rural community somewhere 30-45 minutes away from our office, so through telehealth, we’re able to impact 60-70 children at three different sites at one time,” says Angel Bourdon from Prisma Health.
They hope to expand the program to more schools in the future. The end goal is to have children bringing back home the information that they have learned and applying it. Savannah’s family is the perfect example of this. Her father, Malchus, and brother have lost weight, and they all have started better eating habits. Malchus says Savannah motivates him to live healthier and says, “when you have somebody holding you accountable, you actually achieve your goals.”