You might think, from the title, that this is another article about Kingston High School's music program. Indirectly, it kind of is. But first, we want to talk about beets — the root vegetable.

Jim has been on a beet kick, but I don't enjoy cooking them. They make everything I touch purple and get pretty slimy. So, you'll rarely find me choosing a beet. Last week at the grocery store, he quietly slipped two enormous, dirty-looking beets into the cart. "Oh God," I said. "What are we going to do with those?" Jim likes to remind me that beets are good for circulation and blood pressure and other things that apparently become more interesting as you approach 50. Anyway.

A few days later, Jim cut up his beets and packed some into his lunch for school. I fully expected them to come home again. Instead, the container was empty. "You ate all the beets?" I asked. "No. The kids did." Teenagers voluntarily ate his beets? Apparently one student asked what they tasted like. Jim described a beet as something like a "dirty carrot." Naturally, everyone wanted to try one. And then they ate them all.

It is a tiny story. But it got us thinking about how young people actually learn about health. Sometimes it is not a lecture. It is curiosity. Someone brings in a strange vegetable. Somebody asks a question. They taste something. A conversation starts, and suddenly everyone is talking about beets, blood pressure and circulation.

On Valentine's Day, Jim has a tradition of cutting beets into heart shapes with a cookie cutter and passing them out on paper towels, leaving the kids with little pink hearts stenciled onto their napkins. His efforts are adorable, and one of the reasons this earnest man touches my heart so much.

The problem is that Jim has very little time to create those moments. New York State requires high-school students to earn just one-half credit in health — one semester. In that short stretch, health teachers are expected to cover nutrition, mental and emotional health, alcohol and drugs, tobacco, sexual health, relationships, violence prevention, safety, disease prevention, physical health, decision-making, communication and, increasingly, social media and the health information teenagers encounter there.

That is a lot to cram into one course. And the more material teachers have to get through, the harder it is to slow down and do what happened with the beets: spark curiosity, let students ask questions, and connect what they are learning to their own lives. At least when kids show an interest in music, KHS gives them some opportunities to keep learning year after year. So why do we assume health should end after one semester?

I looked up the research – the evidence suggests we probably should not. Research suggests that well-designed school health programs can modestly improve nutrition, some safer-sex behaviors and some substance-use behaviors, while mental-health education reliably improves knowledge even when changes in help-seeking are harder to demonstrate. Meanwhile, the health picture for teenagers is not great. According to the CDC, more than one in five American teenagers now has obesity. And those beets may have been a rare event: a CDC analysis of 2017 national Youth Risk Behavior Survey data found that only 2 percent of U.S. high-school students met federal recommendations for vegetable intake. And what students learn about health at home varies enormously, and for some, that half-credit may be the only sustained health education they receive unless they opt into a specialized career track through BOCES.

Why not give students a chance to go deeper — in nutrition, public health, addiction science or behavioral health? Healthcare is one of Ulster County's largest employment sectors. These electives could build life skills and introduce students to careers our region actually needs, without requiring them to commit to a career track at 15 or 16.

Music and the arts matter. The question is whether health deserves more too, because school budgets reflect what we think young people need and what kind of community we want to build. Believing in health education starts with each of us. It starts when we ask at the next school budget hearing why health ends after one semester. Or when we tell board members that electives in nutrition and public health matter to us. And for some of us, it can start when we talk with our own kids about what they are learning. For others, it can start with a simple beet tasting.

Jim will probably continue bringing beets to school. Teenagers will probably continue trying them. Curiosity is a pretty good place to start. But if we want healthier students, healthier families and ultimately a healthier Kingston, keeping the beat at Kingston High School should mean more than protecting music. It should also mean giving health education enough time to make a difference.