enlarge Doug Jones/Staff Photographer

Principal Michael Estes gets a blood-pressure check from his health coach, Phil DiRusso, at the West Harpswell Elementary School. Estes and other SAD 75 employees, along with those in three other districts, are engaged in a first-of-its kind wellness program.

Michael Estes has tried losing weight before, but nothing has ever seemed to work.

He's not into organized programs like Weight Watchers, and it's tough to do it on his own. His hours as a teacher and principal at West Harpswell Elementary School are long. Winters are hard because he can't get outside to exercise. He could join a gym, but he knows he wouldn't feel the least bit guilty about missing a workout.

"I swear I was a thermometer in my last life," Estes said. "I go up and down. My job is so demanding of me that I don't have a lot of energy at the end of the day to go and exercise -- and lack of exercise, of course, makes weight gain come on, and when I'm under a lot of pressure, I eat. So it's a wicked cycle."

Estes, 51, knows that he must drop some pounds. He wants to get off of his blood pressure medication and avoid his father's fate -- diabetes and a major stroke. All he needs is a little motivation.

Enter Phil DiRusso, a motivational health coach from Occupational Medical Consulting in Leeds. DiRusso and a colleague are coaching about 280 employees in the Topsham school district (SAD 75) in the first wellness project of its kind in Maine schools.

DiRusso is helping Estes figure out why losing weight is important to him and the best way to go about it. But here's the key point -- there's no yelling and no shaming. Only empathy and encouragement.

"They're very supportive, and it's not like you're a bad person because you're not doing whatever," Estes said. "They basically take the lead from the people who are sitting with them. They guide, but it's not like, 'You overweight creep.'

"It's, 'What are your goals? What would you like to do? What's comfortable for you right now?' "

The two-year pilot project is taking place across four school districts in Maine and involving 660 employees, from school bus drivers and facilities staff to teachers and administrators. It's open to any staff member who uses the health insurance benefit offered by his or her district.

The idea is to lower employees' health risks, improve their overall health and ultimately lower health-care costs. In addition to Topsham-area schools, other districts that are participating are Hampden, Gardiner and Readfield.

The project is being funded by the Maine Education Association Benefits Trust, which manages health-insurance coverage for 90 percent of the schools in the state, and the Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield Foundation. The two groups are chipping in $200,000 each over two years.

Christine Burke, executive director of the MEA Benefits Trust, said after increases in health-care costs of 10 to 11 percent were incurred in the late 1990s, those increases dropped to 4 percent last year.

"As we've addressed more wellness issues, we have been able to see those increases come way down," Burke said, "and we're really hopeful that we'll be able to kind of turn it around. This is a population that people have not necessarily been addressing before."

DISTRICTS MUST BE SUPPORTIVE

School districts have to buy into the program by not making the teachers' sessions with the health coach just one more meeting in an already overscheduled day, even if that means paying for a substitute to take over a class while the teacher gets her tips on quitting smoking or losing weight, Burke said.

"The typical elementary-school teacher walks into that classroom at 7:30 in the morning and doesn't leave until 4 or 4:30 in the afternoon," she said. "And if they do leave, they're frequently assigned to things like lunchroom duty, detention duty, hall duty. They're assigned other tasks, and if they do grab lunch, sometimes it's candy bars. So there isn't even really time for them to think about doing something else."

At a teacher's initial meeting with a coach, the coach does a risk assessment that includes measuring height, weight, total cholesterol,...