Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 25, 1990 TAG: 9003222292
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The 35 freshmen in the William Fleming High School gym begin their daily warm-up drills - jumping jacks, sit-ups, push-ups and stretches - and then head outside to the track.
Their assignment: to run two laps, a half-mile.
About 10 boys and girls complete the run non-stop. Ten others break for a walk, then eventually cross the finish line running. Others give up altogether, casually walking and talking during the last lap.
And then there are the perpetual stragglers.
"Hurry up, we're waiting on you," Laura Barrier yells to the last two on the track.
Barrier, who's been behind the gym-class whistle now for nearly 30 years, stands there shaking her head.
"Getting physical work out of teen-agers in this day and time can be tough," she says. "It's more attitude than anything else. Their attitudes are shaping their physical abilities.
"Too many parents have let the TV be the baby sitter."
As if on cue, a 15-year-old girl walks off the track 20 yards short of the finish line and heads back to the gym.
"Go on inside then," she shouts, glaring at Barrier. "You ain't gotta wait on me."
Physical education teachers in the Roanoke Valley have seen the reports. No health magazine today is complete without the requisite indictment: Study after study shows that children of all ages are miserably out of shape.
This, at a time when the fitness boom is hitting the adult world like a ton of barbells. While mom and dad spend their lunch hours in aerobics class, little Suzy gets fatter and flabbier.
Why the paradox?
"The average elementary-school child gets less than an hour of real phys ed a week. Combine that with television and Nintendo - and there's the problem right there," says George Graham, a professor of health 11 1 FITNESS Fitness and physical education at Virginia Tech.
Area phys ed teachers point to a host of other factors that have anchored youths' sedentary lifestyles:
Increased pressure in the schools for students to excel in the three Rs - sometimes to the exclusion of physical activity. For example, recess hasn't existed in Virginia public schools for at least 10 years because it cuts into academics. And teachers and equipment for physical education are usually the first to go during budget cuts.
An increase in two-career couples and single-family homes. Many latch-key kids are told to stay in the house until their parents come home from work.
Technological advances that have led to a lack of structured physical activity - riding the elevator instead of walking up stairs, for example. Ninety percent of young people's waking hours are spent in a seated position.
And speaking of technology: The average American child spends 24 hours a week in front of the television - as much time as he or she spends in the classroom.
It's no wonder then that the prevalence of obesity in the 6- to 11-year-old age group may have increased by as much as 54 percent from 1963 to 1980, according to a New England Medical Center study.
"When I was growing up, there just weren't as many distractions," says 35-year-old Deke Andrews, director of the Carter Athletic Center at North Cross School.
"By and large, we went outside and were active, whether we were in sports or not. We played pick-up basketball or baseball, or tag." But pick-up games seem to have disappeared as neighborhood and lifestyle patterns have changed.
"Now, you find that only the kids who participate in team sports are active," Andrews says.
And the rest? What kind of shape are they really in?
It's hard to say. Another problem educators face is the system that measures physical fitness: It encourages competition among athletes more than it promotes fitness among all.
Virginia Tech's Graham laughs when asked about the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports fitness guidelines - the chief criteria for determining students' fitness levels in Virginia and in most other states. And he points to the council's new spokesman - Arnold Schwarzenegger - as an indicator of the council's charge: to "send the Rambo message."
"I worry about the other 75 percent of kids who aren't going to be athletes," Graham says. "Obviously, I think these tests are a big flop. Less than 2 percent of the kids in this country ever get the Presidential Physical Fitness Award for excellence."
The test, administered annually to fourth- through 10th-graders, measures performance on a 1-mile run/walk, arm pull-ups, curl-ups (similar to sit-ups) and flexibility exercises.
Nationwide, the President's Council reported that 40 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls ages 6 to 17 cannot do more than one pull-up; half the girls and 30 percent of the boys cannot run a mile in less than 10 minutes.
About 70 percent of Roanoke city and county students could not score at the "satisfactory" level on all four tasks.
"We're about average for the state," says Barrier, "which means we're not too good. Very few girls pass the mile run/walk and the upper-arm strength tests. The boys do a little better, but still not great. And even our best athletes have a hard time passing the upper-arm strength test."
If only more time could be spent practicing fitness, wishes Charles Hamm, supervisor of health and physical education for the Virginia Department of Education.
The state recommends - not requires - that elementary pupils receive 30 minutes of phys ed daily, Hamm says.
Typically in Roanoke Valley elementary schools, this is fulfilled twice a week by phys ed specialists, and on the remaining days by regular classroom teachers. Many classroom teachers use the time for an unstructured play period, making up for the absence of recess from the school day.
At the secondary level through 10th grade, health is generally taught daily for one semester, alternating with daily phys ed the other semester. Few schools offer any phys ed courses for 11th- and 12th-graders, and if they do, phys ed competes with an array of elective academic subjects.
Comprehensive phys ed - kindergarten through the 12th grade - is only required in two states, Illinois and New Jersey.
"Ideally, we would like to see daily phys ed, K through 12, taught by specialists," Hamm says. "But there is so much competition with the other subjects, and such a great push in our society for reading, writing and math.
"I'm beginning to think we're too busy teaching people how to earn a living rather than how to live and enjoy life." Better skills, better attitudes
But the story here isn't all bad news.
Remember the old phys ed days? Remember when the teacher would pick two team captains, and the captains would choose up sides for kickball?
Remember being the last person chosen for a team and how awful that felt?
The good news is that those days are over.
"We're getting away from the three Rs of gym teaching - roll out the ball, read the newspaper and relax," says Hamm. "We're getting more now into the mode of really teaching our youngsters phys ed."
After all, he adds, you don't just hand children a few books and tell them to start reading. You start with the components - the letters, the words, the sentences.
So it goes in the modern-day elementary phys ed class, where a recent afternoon at Penn Forest Elementary was spent learning the intricacies of dribbling, throwing and catching a ball.
"The program here is geared more toward learning skills," says Penn Forest's John Pomeroy, who was named Virginia's top elementary phys ed teacher in 1988.
Pomeroy believes that if children master the skills first, they'll be more likely to succeed in sports such as tennis, basketball and softball - and more apt to stay physically active throughout their lives.
"We ought to work on developing their understanding of the skills first, along with the idea of fitness - that they need to work at it a minimum of three times a week, for a 30- to 40-minute duration each time," Pomeroy says.
At Mount Pleasant Elementary, phys ed specialist Gary Walthall uses the same approach:
"I try to introduce them to as many different things as I can . . . . My theory is that you may not be good at volleyball or basketball, but you may be good at music or soccer - and everybody can find something they're good at."
But given the time constraints of the school day, Walthall believes the true key to shaping up today's kids lies in after-school activities.
And that means parental involvement.
"You need teamwork at home and at school," Walthall says. "We have these kids here for six, seven hours a day. But if they go home to an environment that's not conducive to learning or being fit, and they undo what we're trying to do, it's a never-ending battle.
"They can't just sit there eating potato chips, watching TV and playing Nintendo - these things have some merit, but they can't be done at the expense of active playing."
Last year, only five of Walthall's 75 students scored excellent on the President's Council four-pronged fitness test. So he worked with the others on improving the skills they already had. For instance, with the obese child who couldn't do one pull-up, he worked on improving running time.
Positive reinforcement works.
"I had a 170-pound fourth-grader who has since knocked six minutes off his mile time," Walthall says. "He's still heavy, but he's trying harder than ever.
"Today, he ran seven minutes without stopping, for the first time ever, and he was tickled to death."
A random annual sampling from the millions of boys and girls enrolled in the Chrysler Fund-Amateur Athletic Union testing program showed a 10 percent decline in scores for distance runs over a 10-year period. And there was a major decline, from 43 to 32 percent, in the number who achieved at least "satisfactory" scores in the overall test, which measured endurance, flexibility, abdominal strength and upper body strength.
Researchers concluded last year that if the trend isn't soon reversed, those findings will translate into a higher incidence of heart disease, adult-onset diabetes, low back pain syndrome and other illnesses related to stress and poor fitness.
In other words, the bad news may get worse before it gets better.
And fitness experts say there are only two ways to turn it around: time and money.
"People are starting to understand that good phys ed is necessary, but we've still got a long way to go," says Graham. "The argument is, `You wouldn't teach reading with only one book.' "
Public schools in North Carolina added 250 new elementary phys-ed teacher positions in the past year. And the state of Tennessee recently appropriated $1.5 million to hire additional art, music and phys ed teachers at the elementary level.
Closer to home in recent years, Montgomery and Pulaski County created elementary phys ed specialist positions where none had existed before.
But the fiscal atmosphere is tighter at the secondary level, where the baby boom begins to fizzle and enrollments are declining.
"Typically, the phys ed positions go first, especially at the high-school level," Graham says. "And the main reason is that there isn't a lot of pressure from parents to have good quality phys ed programs at all grade levels.
"Parents need to realize it's not OK if their kids come home from school feeling badly about phys ed. And it's not OK if they play basketball or touch football for 12 weeks out of the year. There is a better brand of phys ed out there, and they should start demanding it."
The phones are already ringing at the state level, according to Hamm. "In the past three months, I've had more calls from parents concerned about their kids not getting the daily phys ed experience than I've ever had.
"But it needs to begin at the local level, at the local school boards," Hamm adds. "The more parents demand, the more likely the dollars are to get there."
And the more likely the General Assembly will be to make daily gym a requirement for all grades - a proposal legislators have discussed but which has not yet been widely supported.
Many fitness experts believe a legislative mandate is the key to reversing the trend toward poor youth fitness, a belief bolstered by a recent Illinois study.
There, where phys ed has been a state requirement since the 1950s, schools are allowed to opt out if they lack the space to conduct daily gym. A 1987 study of 2,622 students in fourth, sixth and eighth grades conducted by the Illinois Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance found that those who had daily phys ed scored significantly higher on fitness tests than those who only took gym three days a week.
People like Mount Pleasant's Walthall believe the ominous alternative to fitness - the increase in heart disease that is bound to hit today's youth in record numbers - should speak louder than the dollars needed to reverse the trend.
"The thing is, you need the reading and the writing to get into society. But if you don't have your health, where's that going to get you?"
by CNB