The College of Family and Consumer Sciences is working to improve the quality of life for Iowans through its Healthy Life Start Initiative.

“I would like to see our students become very aware of what this is all about,” said JaneAnn Stout, associate dean of the FCS college.

Healthy Life Start is a program developed by the FCS college, and it’s geared toward helping families in Iowa with children under 5 years old.

The initiative has five major components aimed at improving the lives of families with young children.

This includes infant and toddler classrooms in the new lab school that will be in the Palmer Building, and it also aims to expand state nutrition education programs to include a parenting component.

The initiative will also create a “Parenting the First Year” newsletter written in Spanish and provided to Hispanic families, and it will continue the university’s work on the National Network for Child Care Web site, located at www.nncc.org.

Finally, the initiative will expand research on finding indicators for developmental problems in preschoolers.

The whole initiative’s main goal is to help educate new parents on taking care of their children.

“The need is so pressing for children and families in that 0-to-5 age. It’s so critical,” Stout said.

College officials started to develop the program around this time last year. “We talked about what the big priority areas were in the college,” FCS Dean Carol Meeks said.

Meeks, Stout and other FCS administrators met to decide what people would be interested in and what the college could do to put it together as a package. The group also met over the summer with ISU President Martin Jischke to discuss the initiative.

“I am absolutely thrilled that the president sees and understands how important this is to the citizens of the state,” Stout said. “I am very pleased that we are getting this opportunity.”

Meeks said the Healthy Life Start Initiative also brings positives to the College of FCS.

“It’s exciting for us to think about because it would add some resources, I think, and make a difference,” she said.

The college has developed a way to get more of ISU’s faculty involved in the program by starting the “Millennium Challenge.”

The goal of the challenge is to educate faculty and staff members as to what they can do to support the initiative. It asks faculty members to use their personal time to support the initiative and also provides suggestions.

The college will be rewarding faculty members who have completed four suggestions on the list with a certificate of recognition at the 2000 FCS Fall Convocation.

Stout said she thinks support from the entire college is important.

“This is our one shot. We need to get everybody behind the effort. We need to get everybody cheerleading for it,” she said.

Stout also said FCS students can benefit from reading about the initiative and thinking about how it will affect their education and lives.

“A lot of our graduates are basically going out there, working with families and consumers, and if we can provide more education, if we can provide research, if we can do more outreach as a college based on this, the world that they enter will be a better world,” she said.