Brighton Schools Adopt Health and Wellness Monitoring Program

As of Monday night's Brighton Board of Education meeting, Brighton Area Schools are one of three districts using a Brighton man's online health and wellness platform.

Board members voted unanimously to adopt Tim Codd's myNutratek platform, joining Howell and Saline school districts currently using the technology.

MyNutratek, an online health and wellness monitoring platform, has been a three year journey for Codd.

It all began when Codd, a father of five, discovered his 8-year-old daughter upset over cruel classmates making negative remarks about her weight.

"It broke my heart," Codd said. "As a parent, I felt guilty and helpless. I was thinking, 'how did I let it come to this?' And I knew I had to fix it."

From that moment, Codd made a promise to his daughter that they would have lunch together once a week, and work on eating healthier.

So Codd ate lunch with his daughter in the cafeteria once a week. Through those weekly meals, he gained a lot of insight that went into creating myNutratek.

MyNutratek takes school lunch menus and assigns nutritional values to each item. Families can then log into the secure and personalized website, entering height, weight and age to find body mass index (BMI) of their children. Then the user would just catalog what he or she ate that day.

The user would also log any exercise completed that day, whether it be in gym class or at a soccer game. The program offers more than 50 different activities, according to Codd.

"It records it, reports it and rewards it," Codd said of My Nutratek. "So if you're compliant in managing this choice over a period of time, you're going to get a healthy nutritional report card. So it's literally turning the lunchroom into a classroom."

The Brighton Area School District will have free access to the platform because of Brighton Superintendent Greg Gray's significant help in helping Codd design and implement the product.

Membership usually costs other district's $50,000 per year, according to Gray. However, Codd is finding ways to enroll schools without paying that cost.

"Schools are struggling financially because they rely on revenue from the community which relies on the economy," Codd said. "So we are qualifying the schools (for myNutratek access) by finding community public and private partnerships. we have found a number of health facilities, insurance companies and retailers that are willing to participate financially in order to get this launched into the schools."

Now this all seems like a lot of work that people will not have the time to do, but Codd said there is one very strong and compelling reason to participate: to save your child's life.

"Children are not going to outlive their parents," he said. "It's a fact. It was in a study done by the Campaign to End Obesity. It's a focus on wellness, parenting and personal responsibility. When kids are not healthy, they don't learn. Also, the health care burden of the family that has weight issues is 20 times more expensive than any healthy family. The figure comes from the National Business Group on Health."

Codd said that districts participate in academic sessions and learn wonderful health and wellness techniques, but they just don't have the resources to implement what they are taught.

"The lunch room is outdated and under resourced," he said.

Codd said this whole experience has been a rewarding situation for his family.

"I've seen my daughter come out of her shell," Codd said. "I truly never thought I would create my own product. This all fell into place because people cared. It's amazing what can happen when people care."