The Rales Center
Founded in 2014 with a gift from the Norman and Ruth Rales Foundation, the Rales Center at Johns Hopkins is working to fundamentally re-imagine school health programs to promote student health and wellbeing and reduce health and educational inequality.
The Rales Center’s Vision is to be a national leader in developing, evaluating, and disseminating new models of school health that integrate health, educational, and developmental services for young people and their families to measurably improve the health and future productivity of children and adolescents, their families, and their communities. Our goal is to improve children‚ lifelong prospects by improving their health and academic success.
The Rales Center is implementing, and rigorously evaluating the Rales Model, a comprehensive approach to student health and wellness at KIPP Baltimore, two public charter schools that share one building in the Walbrook neighborhood of Baltimore City. Together, the two schools serve more than 1600 students. Traditionally, school-based health centers provide health services to a subset of students but are separate from the educational environment. In contrast, the Rales Model uses a multidisciplinary team of health professionals and wellness experts who are fully integrated into the school in order to support the needs of the whole child.
The Rales Model is informed by the CDC’s‚ Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) Model. Comprehensive preventive and acute pediatric healthcare is combined with health education, social and emotional skills support, family advocacy, staff wellness, and other programs that address the full range of student, family, and staff health needs in schools.