School District to Tackle Obesity

I just so happened to catch some of the school board meeting tonight. There’s not a whole lot going on, but one thing that stood out to me was the new health initiative the district is looking at implementing. I don’t have specifics or links as this is a real-time deal, but the gist of the presentation (that played like a broken record 3 times…I love it when that multi-million dollar technology they use makes them look like a 3rd world country) was that many kids are obese and the school district is going to tackle the problem through education, limiting bad food choices, and increased exercise. Sounds good right? Not so fast. Some of it made sense, most of it was downright laughable (like placing the responsibility on vendors like Sodexho to teach nutrition).

Here’s the problem, a lot of kids are fat, but honestly it’s not JUST the school that’s making them this way. Forcing teachers to implement and document some 15-20 minutes of extra exercise a day (rubric and all) isn’t going to erase that bag of Doritos and zombification sessions in front of the TV for hours on end once these kids get home. What this will do is put an even higher workload on teachers, who already have more than enough ineffective paperwork to chase and it will take away from academic instruction time.

This is nothing more than a “feel good” program that will not effectively curb adolescent obesity, but it’ll give those folks up top something to pat their own backs about.