News-Record.com

Keep the kids skinny. Read an article today that said the amount of fat-holding cells level out in the body at about the age of 20. So, if your kids are fat when their young, they'll have more trouble getting healthy when they're old.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20080530/sc_livescience/fatfindingrevealswhydietsdontwork;_ylt=ArPr1AsPL8CaP6FeJozV8hXZn414

Anyway.

Kids and Exercise
Letter, EDUCATION NEXT
Spring, 2007
http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext/6022631.html

Thanks to “Don’t Sweat It” (features, Fall 2006) and “Not Your Father’s PE” (research, Fall 2006), we now know that top-down solutions to child obesity offer minimal benefit. A “bottom-up” approach would be to change the way we fund schooling. We fund systems; we do not fund students. Because districts tend to add classrooms to existing structures as enrollment grows, we have large schools.

District consolidation also put us on the road to supersize schools. In 1931, there were 120,000 school districts. By 2000, there were fewer than 15,000. University of Chicago professor Christopher Berry (“School Inflation,” research, Fall 2004) studied the period of greatest school-district consolidation, 1930–70. Berry found a consistent correlation of .70 between school size and district size, across states. Big districts have big schools.

How do big schools lead to inactive, overweight kids? To go to and from big, consolidated schools—often at remote sites—children wait for and sit in buses instead of walking or bicycling to a nearby school and playing in the schoolyard before and after the bell. High schoolers and middle schoolers are doubly afflicted: when they finally arrive at their very large schools, they find that the most popular sports are dominated by elite athletes. A glance at almost any high-school annual of the 1920s through the 1950s (before the final wave of consolidation) will reveal a lot of skinny young people, small senior classes, and wide participation in the major sports.

Were we to fund students rather than systems, such schools—and skinny kids—would make a comeback.

Tom Shuford
Retired Public School Teacher
Lenoir, North Carolina

Good eating habits should be established as soon as a toddler is ready to "eat". It is normal and natural for children to want sugary, sweet foods. But what a child puts into his/her mouth is provided by the caregiver. The key, therefore, to childhood obesity is parents (or caregiver).

What parents fail to realize is this is serious business. They are killing their children when they fail in their responsibility to provide and enforce good nutritional intake. Kids are dying early from diabetes and heart disease. They are, in fact, dying before their parents.

This is not the natural order of things. And this trend needs to be corrected.

Mr. Shuford has the right idea on funding students not schools. The overlarge public school system is a large part of the entire educational mess. Smaller schools that are community based would better benefit students.

Mr. Peltzer contradicts himself. First he says the problem starts with parents, then he excuses uninvolved parents (work is always a wonderful excuse) and turns right back to the faceless school system. Which one is it?

I do believe the cure begins with parents. Parents who insist on quality meals, eaten at the dinner table as a family. Eating in front of the TV is a contributing factor because people lose track of how much they are actually eating. We also need parents who realize they are not their child's friend, and are willing to say "No," to demands for fast food, sugary cereals, and drinking of soda instead of milk or water at the dinner table.

Military boot camp PE is not the answer, either. Children subjected to that sort of "exercise" become discouraged and quit trying. It is not good for children to be treated like boots. Treat them like children. Mandatory PE is a good idea, but should involve games and activities that get them up and moving, that are fun.

I also think students should have recess through middle school. They are still young enough to want to be outside and active, if allowed. Those who don't can take a mental break and either study or take a power nap. Either would rejuvenate them for the rest of the school day.