A Healthy Lynnfield once again visited the Lynnfield High School gymnasium with their Health and Wellness Fair on Wednesday, where vendors from the community, along with students, presented on the body, healthy lifestyles, collective care, and more.
A new addition to the fair and what is soon to be a centerpiece at all A Healthy Lynnfield events is a giant inflatable brain the group recently purchased to teach students about the organ.
Organizing the event in conjunction with A Healthy Lynnfield was the high school nurse Risa Ferrara, who reached out to organizations like the Lynnfield Center Water District and the Torigian Family YMCA.
Also at the fair were student groups that brought their trifold posters from the Civics Action projects, which were first presented to the public last month.
“I like to pull in a lot of different people from the community, and then I pull certain students from our Civic Action fair. I had some student groups,” Ferrara said. “One was on women’s health. One was on vaping. One was on driving under the influence. I put them with the health department because they had the under-the-influence goggles.”
Local businesses provided Ferrara with 23 raffle items, like $150 to Burton’s Grill and Bar and a workout outfit from Booty by Brabants.
Students can then enter the raffles with tickets they earn by exchanging stickers they gather from each of the vendors, giving them even more incentive to see each station and learn something new.
“Risa does an unbelievable job at trying to get all different topics in front of the kids. So there’s karate, there’s mental health, there’s recovery, there’s water, there’s healthy food,” A Healthy Lynnfield Program Coordinator Diana DeLeo said. “We’re lucky that the school supports it, and they’ve supported them for a long time. The kids can rotate in throughout the school day to get the information that they probably wouldn’t otherwise receive.”
Freshmen who were visiting the fair for the first time were given 45 minutes to explore the gymnasium, while the rest of the classes were given 30 minutes.
Making the day especially fun was the interactivity of some of the vendors, like Cervizzi’s Martial Arts Academy, letting students break a wooden board or a device at Dermatology and Skin Health’s booth that lets users see sun damage on their skin using UV light.
“There’s your regular light, and then we switch it to LED, and it highlights any brown pigment that shows that you got some damage there,” Gary Mendese, M.D., said while giving a demonstration. “These are your body’s way of protecting itself from this. Some people are more predisposed to them than others. They’re not necessarily bad, but if you had a ton of them, it wouldn’t be awesome.”
Representing Wakefield Alliance Against Violence was Jean Yentile, who provided students with resources on unhealthy resources housed on their website, waavonline.org.
“We work with the Wakefield Police Department if someone is in need of having their door locks changed, or if they need a Verizon court or just supporting the victims we have,” Yentille said. “It’s hard to talk about unhealthy relationships with abuse, but you can direct that person to go on our website if you don’t feel uncomfortable talking about it.”
Other popular visitors to the high school were Ellie and Polly, the therapy dogs who provided plenty of cuddles, comfort, and de-stressing to the students.
Of course, the largest feature of the fair was the inflatable brain that allowed visitors to walk inside and learn about all the activity happening inside a human skull and the different effects substances can have on it.
It was the brain’s first appearance since A Healthy Lynnfield’s recent purchase of the educational attraction, and the group plans to bring it to the Healthy Living Expo on Saturday, May 17th, and later rent it out for other communities to use.
“This year, I was really excited, because it’s new, and we just unboxed it last night. It’s really cool, and it’s here to stay because we now own it,” DeLeo said. “You don’t realize it until the students come in and you’re asking them to do these things, like put on a pair of drunk goggles, or do a vertical jump, or walk through a brain; you realize how awesome they really are.”
