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As
kids get wider, schools struggle to squeeze in enough fitness time
By
Scott
McCredie
Seattle Times staff reporter
On the first day of school, you might be tempted to stop worrying
about all the "screen time" your kids racked up during the summer —
with a TV, PC, or video game. The kids will get plenty of exercise in gym class,
right?
Not necessarily.
Most of the state's schoolkids receive far less than the 30 minutes
a day (or 150 minutes a week) of gym time recommended by the National
Association for Sport and Physical Education (NASPE), a nonprofit group of
physical educators headquartered in Reston, Va.
Indeed, the majority even fall short of the state-required 100
minutes a week of PE for grades 1-8, according to Pamela Tollefsen, the health
and fitness program supervisor for the Washington Office of Superintendent of
Public Instruction. She estimates that schools offer children about 60 minutes a
week on average, with wide variations among the districts.
The impulse to give PE short shrift in the curriculum exists at a
time when kids are becoming less fit. Obesity among children has risen
dramatically in the past two decades, with rates doubling for children and
tripling for adolescents. At the same time, kids have experienced an increased
risk of high cholesterol, hypertension and Type-2 diabetes.
Some blame electronic media for kids' extra pounds. According to a
1999 Kaiser Family Foundation report, the typical American child spends an
average of 5-1/2 hours a day watching TV, playing video games, listening to
music and surfing the Net. Such diversions, they say, cut into the time kids
could be playing sports, riding bikes or running around in the back yard.
Other experts point to society's increased dependence on cars as a
cause of inactivity in children. A federal Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention study reports that nearly 40 percent of all trips to school are a
mile or less, yet only 31 percent of the trips to school are made by walking.
The study also reports that walking and bicycling by kids between ages 5 and 15
dropped 40 percent between 1977 and 1995.
Though kids are less active at home and more in need of regular PE,
school administrators and teachers appear unable to boost PE time or to heed
numerous studies that stress the benefits of exercise for learning and overall
well-being.
"I believe students need more PE," says Kris Pepper,
health and PE curriculum developer for the Bellevue School District. "If I
had my way we'd have daily PE for every class from K through 12. But that's not
going to happen."
The obstacles to more PE time are plentiful. Tops among them:
limited hours in the school day. In an era of standardized tests, schools feel
under the gun to boost academics, leaving PE to vie with art and music for
whatever hours are left.
Another problem is limited finances and facilities. Most schools
just have one PE teacher and one gym, which is not enough to provide all kids
with daily PE.
"If you have a school that has more than 300 kids — and
that's most schools outside of Seattle — it's impossible to see kids more than
two or three times a week," says Bud Turner, the PE coordinator for the
Seattle School District. "You can only see eight or nine classes a
day."
Finally, parents are not pushing for more PE time. Their concerns
tend to focus on other areas of the curriculum
For these reasons, many school districts fail to even meet the
state's 18-year-old rule of offering a weekly 100 minutes of PE to all
elementary students. And technically, they could lose funding for being in
violation of the rule, says Larry Davis, executive director of the Washington
State School Board in Olympia.
But the board lacks money for enforcement and is discussing the
possibility of deleting the rule altogether. Not only is the rule difficult to
comply with, it also treats PE differently from all other school subjects. The
other subjects have competency rather than time requirements.
"The fact is, there's not an easy, clean answer to this
issue" of limited PE time, Davis says.
With so many demands on the curriculum today, some experts support
the idea of an extended school calendar. The length of the school day (6 hours)
and year (9 months) have remained fixed for 100 years, says Judy Young,
executive director of the NASPE. They were established when America was a more
agrarian country, so that kids would have time to help out on the family farm,
which, in a sense, was a true physical education.
"We're just beginning to get alarmed by all the inactivity in
our lives," Young says. "We never used to have to worry about
it."
Scott McCredie: 206-464-2430 or smccredie@seattletimes.com.
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