Our View: with roughly one in four local children considered
obese, physical fitness must be a priority for public
education.
Now that the annual Thanksgiving feast is nothing but a pleasant memory, take a few minutes to reflect upon the number of calories, carbohydrates and fat grams you will consume as the holiday season continues and consider the growing problem of obesity in California’s children.
The California Center for Public Health Advocacy released sobering statistics recently: Gilroy leads Santa Clara County with the highest percentage of overweight children in the county, with 31 percent. Morgan Hill’s rate is still an alarming 23 percent; San Jose’s is 27 percent; and Palo Alto’s is 13 percent.
Combine these statistics with results from the California Physical Fitness Report released last week and it’s clear South County and the much of the rest of California has a serious problem looming in our children.
In Morgan Hill, between 28 and 36 percent of our students in fifth, seventh and ninth grades failed the body composition portion of the fitness test. In the same group, 30 to 40 percent failed the aerobic capacity test.
Less than 40 percent of seventh and ninth graders passed all six of the tests and only 21.8 percent of fifth graders had perfect scores.
That means only 2 of 10 fifth graders and 4 of 10 seventh and ninth graders are considered physically fit on all levels of the test – a frightening foreshadowing of future health problems for our area.
Clearly, physical fitness, like literacy, math skills and science knowledge, has lifelong benefits that help society.
But that’s not all. Physical fitness is associated with improved academic performance. And getting the opportunity to burn of some pent-up energy in the middle of the school day can help students learn a healthy way to deal with tension and can lead to better behavior in the classroom.
To supplement their efforts, schools also should begin fitness outreach programs to teach parents how to keep their kids active and the importance it will play in the rest of their lives. Our schools cannot bare sole responsibility for our children’s health.
Let’s put away short-term excuses that we can’t afford to have physical education in our schools. The truth is that we can’t afford not to have it.
Perhaps our trained physical education teachers can show regular classroom teachers how to lead meaningful fitness instruction on the days the PE teachers aren’t available.
Excellent teachers will find ways to incorporate PE into their classroom instruction, like graphing scores or tallying runs or writing about games and experiences.
We’ve harped on this subject numerous times in the past, but clearly, it’s time to raise the topic again: We need to make time for daily physical education in our public schools. If that means extending the school day for 30 or 40 minutes to fit it into the schedule, so be it. It’s that important.
Let’s put this item high on the school district’s list of priorities before it becomes too late, find the change and make it.
It’s simply too expensive to ignore this problem any longer.
