The largest school district in Kansas has chosen not to participate in a federal program for free meals to all students at no cost to their families. I offer the following from the article I read:

“The logistical problem that comes into play is adding this massive amount of paperwork to the already massive enrollment process,” he said. “So what happens is, sometimes parents refuse.

 

“What’s their incentive for doing this paperwork when they’re going to get free lunch anyway?”

 

Last year’s form “looked like an IRS form or something, with real small type and tons of information,” Kipp said. “So I could understand the apprehension.”

Taken from the Yahoo feed:

Screening teens for obesity may not help them lose weight

By Madeline Kennedy (Reuters Health) – Weight screenings in high school were not enough to get overweight and obese kids on track toward a healthier weight, a recent U.S. study found.

Eduhonesty: Duhhh. I guarantee readers that America’s students are almost all aware of their weight and where they stand with regards to the standards set by public media. If knowing my weight was enough to get me to diet, I’d be dieting right now. I’d have been dieting for years probably, and my weight isn’t that far off the acceptable norm, which has a bad habit of changing every so often — just like that pesky food pyramid, which recently demoted wheat. In fact, my BMI is 24.5 — acceptable according to almost all sources. A few years ago, though, my numbers were too high according to my doctor, even though I weighed less than I do now.

I’d like to suggest that districts stop sending home letters to tell parents their children are overweight. I could support a letter that included weight expectations for certain heights and ages with appropriate caveats related to muscle mass and body frame. I could support school nutrition and exercise programs designed to help students learn how to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Given America’s growing weight problem, I think this change might be overdue, although the honest truth is that restoring daily P.E. would go a long way toward this goal without any extra layers of instruction. We have gutted P.E. at a time when videogames have taken over as many students’ main afternoon activity.

According to Nielsen, the average U.S. gamer age 13 or older spent 6.3 hours a week playing video games during 2013. That’s up from 5.6 hours in 2012, which was up from 5.1 hours in 2011. In addition, “U.S. console gamers are diversifying the devices they play on, as 50 percent say they also play games on a mobile or tablet device, up from 35 percent in 2011.”

From the New York Times on the topic of P.E.:

Despite Obesity Concerns, Gym Classes Are Cut

More than a half-century ago, President Dwight D. Eisenhower formed the President’s Council on Youth Fitness, and today Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Michelle Obama are among those making childhood obesity a public cause. But even as virtually every state has undertaken significant school reforms, many American students are being granted little or no time in the gym.

In its biennial survey of high school students across the nation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in June that nearly half said they had no physical education classes in an average week. In New York City, that number was 20.5 percent, compared with 14.4 percent a decade earlier, according to the C.D.C.

That echoed findings by New York City’s comptroller, in October, of inadequate physical education at each of the elementary schools that auditors visited. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, found just 20 percent of elementary schools in San Francisco’s system were meeting the state’s requirements: 20 minutes per day.

(I decided 2012 was an acceptable year for a source since, if anything, our problem will be worse today. P.E. time is not increasing while videogame time has been climbing, cutting into outside activities that might help compensate for the ongoing lack of physical instruction.)

Returning to my topic, I object to letters from the nurses office that say “Maria” is overweight. The odds that this letter will result in Maria promptly dieting down to her optimal weight are extremely slim. But like the test scores from inappropriate standardized tests, that weight letter may flatten poor Maria’s already faltering self-esteem. Those letters are more likely to create girls and boys who stick their fingers down their throat while loudly running water in the bathroom than anything else.

To put it simply, shaming seldom works. The emotional fall-out from shaming can be devastating. We can’t change behaviors by sideswiping them with one negative note from the nurse’s office. Until we offer real help to our out-of-shape students, those ham-handed, ineffective letters and studies related to student weight need to stop.

A few days ago, I wrote about free range children circling blocks in the fading summer sunlight. As much as I like the idea of kids enjoying their vacation evenings, I observed that we live in a tricky times. Let me add another note to my concerns.

Gang activity has become entrenched in various neighborhoods across the United States. In other areas, gangs are getting footholds and parents may not be aware of the risks these gangs pose.

This issue has zip code written all over it. My best advice would be to call local law enforcement and ask what gang activity has been taking place in your area. Even in rural areas, recruiting may be going on under parents’ noses. Both Lake and McHenry counties, for example, exemplify comfortable, collar counties outside Cook County and Chicago. Many suburbs in these counties have great schools and middle- to upper-middle class neighborhoods. Nevertheless, both counties are battling gang activity.

One other important note: While African-American and Hispanic males may predominate in gangs, white kids and girls also join gangs, especially in rural areas. The site http://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/survey-analysis/demographics contains some membership breakdowns, such as the chart below:

In addition to talking to the local law, I also recommend a conversation with the kids.

“Are there any gangs in your school?”  might be the first question.

In these times, I guarantee that kids will receive little instruction on nutrition. The “healthy” lunches of our time — often lacking in necessary calories, in my view — do not come with explanations or instructions. The curricula don’t leave enough time to teach handwriting or geography, much less nutrition.

My own kids learned about nutrition at home and I am going to suggest adding this to summer learning projects. When my kids were little, my husband and I would play a game at dinner where everyone had to guess the nutritional information on cans and boxes. How much fat? How much sat fat? How much sodium? How many carbohydrates? How many calories per serving? How much fiber? How much vitamin C? One person would hold the noodle box and the others would guess. Parents played too. We didn’t hammer home a set of rules. We just played a guessing game.

Some good critical thinking questions come out of games like this, such as the following: What do you think the serving size will be for this number of calories? Why do you think they picked that serving size? Is that what people really eat? Why do “sugars” and “carbohydrates” end up being almost the same numbers? Why doesn’t this have fiber? Are the beans in the bag healthier than the beans in the can?

We played this game for some months. Eventually, boredom set in when we had mostly mastered the numbers for the products found in our home. The kids learned a lot. We managed to have conversations about healthy eating without preaching. The game provided a jumping off place for short side discussions about topics like the role of fiber in diet and why too much sat fat could be unhealthy.

Eduhonesty: Nutritional awareness ought to be taught at home. Kids may not get this instruction in school, or may receive such an abbreviated lesson that the information will not stick. I don’t care if my kids eat ice cream sometimes — my parents seem to be living on it in their old age — but I do want them to understand why they need to throw some fruits and vegetables into the mix and why they will benefit from a variety of foods.

The food game can also help kids learn to ask questions about the world. Any family game that gets kids to ask questions about why or how things work has to be a win. Questions without obvious answers can lead to family internet searches that teach search strategies, allowing kids to learn how to learn — a skill that will prove invaluable throughout their lives.

We barely teach geography anymore. Even teachers who want to teach geography may be unable to find the time, given the burgeoning math and English curricula that must be finished each year. Another common loss, sacrificed to the focus on standardized test scores, has been telling time. Specifically, I keep getting middle-school students who cannot read analog clocks. Other teachers report the same.

Parents, teachers and grandparents:  We are dropping important topics in education today, but I don’t see that problem being solved or even addressed in the near future. May I suggest taking time this summer to work on telling time? Specifically, kids need to understand analog clocks. They need to know how the big hand and the little hand work. Once America’s children would have learned this skill in school, but now the clocks are not expected to be on the test so students quite possibly will never work with those “old-fashioned” clocks. Even math problems that add and subtract time likely will use digital clocks, leaving the more traditional clocks of the past — still quite prevalent in society — untouched.

Eduhonesty: As we gut our curricula, at least in terms of breadth, parents and family will need to do more home schooling. Our kids should know the states around them. They should be able to find Africa and South America. They should recognize the import of a big hand between the three and the four along with a little hand on the six.  I’d like to ask parents and family to help with these missions.

Please check your boy or girl’s background knowledge. Ask questions. And if you find too many questions without answers, complain to your local school board and principal. I have taught multiple students who entered my classes thinking they lived in the country of Waukegan, students who could not tell South America from North America or a continent from a country.

We owe our students much better but, in the meantime, if the school’s are failing as they scramble for higher test scores, we parents must pick up the slack.

Clocks should not be a mystery.