Supporting Community Health: Heart Zones

When you give to the Sauk Prairie Healthcare Foundation, you support your local healthcare system and your community. Your gift funds community wellness projects, like Heart Zones, fitness technology software.

Grand Avenue Elementary School in Prairie du Sac has used Heart Zones for three years with some inspiring results. They are now a national leader in the use of Heart Zones, helping other educators successfully use the technology.

Eric Scheunemann, Physical Education Teacher, Grand Avenue Elementary: We had a fellow teacher in a different district who was a parent tell us about Heart Zones and how they were using it in their classroom, and asked if we would be interested. So we’re able to purchase six heart rate monitors and with those six we just rotated them between students and we saw the results right away of them getting instant feedback.

Because it was expensive we were kinda limited and so what we did is we did some more research on the heart rate monitors and in the process the hospital kinda found out and we were able to then with partnership with them, be able to purchase the heart rate monitors.

Text: Foundation funds have purchased monitors to cover students in the Sauk Prairie, Lodi, River Valley and Wisconsin Heights School Districts.

Brianna, 10th Grade, Wisconsin Heights: I can feel when I’m starting to really work and it’ll show me that I am really working and that’ll help me a lot in the future.

Jeff Johnson, Physical Education Teacher, River Valley Middle School: We here at River Valley feel extremely lucky to have Heart Zones’ state-of-the-art technology that is helping our kids as well as us as teachers.

Drake, 4th Grade, Lodi Elementary: Thank you to the donors who bought us the Heart Zones.

Text: Heart Zones engages, assesses and motivates local students to pursue safe and healthy active lifestyles by measuring and displaying their heart rate.

Jake, 5th Grade, Grand Avenue Elementary: It kinda keeps track of your heart. If your heart’s at like 98, that’s kinda blue and red’s like when your heart’s beating constantly, orange too. But blue’s when it’s just calm and then the same for green. Yellow’s kinda in the middle.

It really helps me because I get to see what my heart is doing and now I can notice when I don’t have the heart rate monitors on, if my heart’s tired, I gotta stop. I used to not stop when I was a kid, just keep doing it. I actually know I was out, I was getting dizzy and I didn’t feel the best and my heart was going and just pounding.

Ever since I started using these my heart’s been better because I know when to stop and when to keep going and yeah, it helps me a lot.

Jacob Breunig, Physical Education Teacher, Grand Avenue Elementary: My hope would be that we only have these kids for so many years and when they’re not with us anymore, they’re gonna have an understanding of what each zone is that they’re in, if it’s blue, green, yellow, orange or red, and how their body feels at that point, so that when they are young adults and older adults and they’re exercising on their own, they’re understanding which zone they're in and how long they need to be working in that zone to help maximize their own health, so they can live the healthiest lives that they can.

Getting a feeling of what each zone is like is the important one and our kids are getting really good at it. If we have them turn the monitors off, we ask them to move around and what color do you think you’re in and we’ll have them guess and most of them are pretty good at figuring out what zone their in which is incredible for this age.

Eric Scheunemann: We’re able to look at student engagement as well, so they’re way more engaged in their overall health and having the tools to be able to see what direction their health is going. So if they aren’t liking the results they can change that and see that instant feedback right away.

All my work is beneficial because I’m seeing those results with the heart rate monitors.

Jacob Breunig: I’m a parent and my child uses Heart Zones, which has really brought me into the classroom with them. It has allowed me to get a better understanding of how hard my child is working in class.

Sauk Prairie is an amazing community and we want to continue to make it amazing and healthy at the same time. And by starting to do that with these young kids, and them having their parents involved with seeing the reports makes that connection with school and it has kinda taken our program to the next level.

Jeff Johnson: Thank you very much Sauk Prairie Healthcare.

Brianna, 10th Grade, Wisconsin Heights: Thank you to the people who helped bring Heart Zones to our school.

Student 1: Thank you for your gift, we really like Heart Zones.

Student 2: Thank you for your gift.

Wisconsin Heights, River Valley, Lodi and OSC Students: Thank you for our Heart Zones (cheering).

Text: Your support helps fund Heart Zones and so many other worthy causes in our community. Find out more at SaukPrairieHealthcare.org/Foundation

End Transcript

Give Now