Sunday, July 22, 2007
Getting on track
With little federal or state guidance, Southwest Virginia schools tackle the tough problem of childhood obesity.
Photos by Josh Meltzer | The Roanoke Times
Back Creek Elementary School students run laps together in an after-school running club. The students receive charms for necklaces based on how many miles they run in the club.
Back Creek Elementary School students stretch before heading to the track for a voluntary after-school running club workout.
Instructor Susan Chambers, a retired teacher, works on Luke Barrett's backstroke skills while his fellow Raleigh Court Elementary School classmate, Consuelo Chavez Valasco, waits for her turn with Chambers.
Amber Lamm, a student at James Madison Middle School, swims laps during a school-sponsored swimming fitness program toward the end of the 2006-07 school year.
Related
Interactive
Graphic
Blog
On a hot and bright day in May, Mariellen Himmel led about a dozen energetic students outside Roanoke County's Clearbrook Elementary School, reminded them to drink a lot of water and set them loose.
Himmel, a fourth-grade teacher, volunteers her time at the end of the school day to lead a running club, one of at least nine in Roanoke County. There's a similar program at Raleigh Court Elementary School in Southwest Roanoke.
The clubs are a small way Southwest Virginia schools have tackled childhood obesity, which has caused much hand-wringing from adults as sedentary lifestyles become the norm and fast-food restaurants beckon from every corner.
The statistics are staggering: In 2004, about 17.4 percent of American teenagers were overweight, more than three times as many as in 1980, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In response, the federal government last year mandated that every school district in the country adopt a "wellness plan" designed to guide districts toward improving children's health.
And this year, the Virginia General Assembly said the state's school superintendent should work with the state health commissioner to address childhood obesity.
But those efforts don't mean that local officials have to make any changes. Nor do they give local officials many resources to combat the problem.
As a result, health and nutrition programs become almost exclusively the responsibility of local school districts. And it's difficult for districts to devote a lot of time and money to combating childhood obesity when they're struggling with low funding and increasingly strict state and federal academic standards.
In Southwest Virginia's two largest school divisions, Roanoke and its suburban neighbor, Roanoke County, school officials have undertaken a patchwork of different approaches to the same challenges.
On their own
In Roanoke, the school system's federally mandated wellness plan calls on the school board to "support" at least 20 minutes of recess a day. But only two of the city's 21 elementary schools gave students at least 20 minutes of recess last year, according to data obtained from the school system.
State regulations require only that elementary school students receive physical education classes and recess but don't specify how much, leaving the details up to local officials, who in turn leave it up to individual schools.
Streamlining physical education citywide would be difficult because not all schools have gymnasiums, and only 17 PE teachers juggle all 21 elementary schools and their roughly 6,200 students.
The city's plan is a "generic" document, said Kathy Tucker, Roanoke's coordinator of health and physical education who helped craft the plan.
"We dreamed big dreams," she recalled. "We wrote it up. When we presented it, it became condensed because of budgetary constraints."
It also doesn't help that the physical education programs available in the city school system are frequent targets of budget cuts. Most recently, the school board considered eliminating a program that teaches the basics of swimming to all students in kindergarten, first and second grades, many of whom have never been in the water before.
It wasn't until the day of the final budget adoption in May that the $70,000 program was spared for one more year.
Trimming high-fat meals
Roanoke is not alone. High-stakes testing and rigid curricula have pinched physical education and recess across the country, according to Jim Bohland, director of the Institute for Community Health at Virginia Tech.
In Roanoke County, by contrast, the school system provides its elementary school students with a half-hour of physical education a day. In some schools, that daily half-hour doubles as recess.
The county's exhaustive plan also gets into the nuts and bolts of snack foods, specifying, for instance, how large portions of potato chips should be (less than 2 ounces) and how much sodium a prepackaged snack should contain (no more than 480 mg).
In the early 1980s, pizza, french fries and hot dogs became staples of school lunches. Congress in 1981 eliminated one-third of the funding for school breakfast and lunch programs, forcing schools to raise their meal prices, which in turn led students to drop out of the programs, according to the School Nutrition Association.
To attract students and their lunch dollars, school nutrition programs started appealing to children's palates with child-friendly but high-fat offerings.
Today, nutrition programs in both Roanoke and Roanoke County are trying to wean students off those fatty foods. Both now offer regular fruit and vegetable choices. Roanoke County students eat pizza made with low-fat cheese, fries that are baked and hot dogs made from turkey.
In the city, the pizza is made with whole-grain wheat; fried foods and trans fats, which extend the shelf life of foods, are being cut back.
"They like hot dogs here, so you might as well serve them a healthy one," said Ed Tutle, Roanoke County's supervisor of school nutrition services.
You calling my kid fat?
It's hard to tell how successful school efforts have been. Right now, no one knows how many children in Virginia are overweight. State lawmakers have defeated efforts the past two years to measure the body mass index of public school students. The BMI calculates whether a person is overweight based on a ratio of height and weight.
Nine states -- Arkansas, California, Illinois, Tennessee, West Virginia, Delaware, Florida, Missouri and Pennsylvania -- have some program in place to measure students' BMIs.
But if Virginia starts regular BMI testing "what we will do is have a lot of parents who will be irate over doing that and ending up having their child come home embarrassed and upset because of the BMI," said state Sen. Harry Blevins, R-Chesapeake, who worked as a high school principal for 23 years.
Roanoke and Chesterfield counties, however, have launched their own BMI programs.
For the past three years, Roanoke County has been testing students in kindergarten and grades three, five, seven and 10. Last year, it tested 5,214 students and found that roughly 41 percent of boys and 37 percent of girls tested were either overweight or at risk of being overweight, roughly the same as the national average, according to LaVern Davis, the school system's supervisor of health services.
Those results have barely budged in the past three years.
Davis said she heard complaints from parents the first year of testing, but the number of complaints has since fallen. Carlton Mabe, who served last year as president of the county's council of PTAs, supports the testing and said he has also heard fewer complaints about the program.
Health mandates rejected
Besides BMI testing, state lawmakers also have pushed back efforts to establish health standards in public schools and, earlier this year, killed a bill to rid school cafeterias of trans fats.
State Sen. John Edwards, D-Roanoke, who was behind earlier unsuccessful legislative efforts, introduced a watered-down bill this year asking the state's school superintendent to partner with the health commissioner against childhood obesity. That bill, which was stripped of all mandates, was signed by Gov. Tim Kaine.
Edwards called it "irrational" that lawmakers who so readily embraced rigorous academic requirements for students and the state's Standards of Learning tests should be so reluctant to endorse statewide school health and nutrition standards.
Bohland, the Institute for Community Health director, agreed.
"We've challenged schools to improve the minds, but we really haven't challenged them much to improve the health and the bodies of our kids," he said. "That's an area where state policy could play a role but does not in this state."
But Blevins, who supported Edwards' bill this year, said mandating more physical education would require hiring new teachers and building new gyms. That's money the state wasn't going to provide, and lawmakers were hesitant to force local districts to foot the bill, he said.
Secret weapon: parents
Faced with vague government directives and perennial funding shortfalls, schools continue to rely on grass-roots volunteer efforts such as the running clubs to help children learn healthy lifestyles.
Parent groups are getting into the act as well. Instead of selling candy for fundraisers, state and national PTA groups are selling jewelry, wrapping paper and tote bags.
"We want to be at the forefront of this," said Mabe, the Roanoke County PTA officer. "We can talk about nutrition in the schools, we can ask the schools to serve more nutritious programs and all this. It's kind of like you lead by example."
Mabe has been doing just that. On June 2, 2006, as he was about to take over as the county's PTA president, Mabe realized he needed more energy and decided to lose weight. In the past year, he has dropped more than 170 pounds, thanks to diet and exercise.
To school officials, people such as Mabe are a secret weapon.
"When you get parents to buy into it, it's a lot easier because they [children] do go home after school," Roanoke County's Davis said.
