Health & Fitness
Newark...shape up!!!
This is a comment on today's article: "Newark Fifth Graders Top List of Unhealthy Children in Public School".
Four years ago, when my daughter was in 4th grade at Lincoln, her homeroom teacher chose not to do the 60 min/week of PE that she was supposed to do (the PE teacher only did 40 min/week). I started a little investigation on the subject of PE in schools, and made a website (sosnewark.org.)
I looked at the yearly Fitnessgram test and made the diagram of the 2007-2008 numbers for 5th graders (see photo). According to those numbers 75% of the Kennedy students were obese/outside of healthy fitness zone (HFZ). This, if true would be very alarming. I asked for a comment from the principal (never heard back), and the school district, which gave me bureaucratic nonsense answer:
THE 26.6% OF STUDENTS WHO WERE “IN THE FITNESS” ZONE FOR BODY COMPOSITION DOES NOT INFORM US ABOUT THE SPECIFICS OF THE OTHER STUDENTS. FOR EXAMPLE, WE DO NOT KNOW TO WHAT DEGREE THEY DID NOT MEET THE FITNESS CRITERIA FOR BODY COMPOSITION.
THE FITNESSGRAM DOES NOT AND IS NOT INTENDED TO ASSESS THE QUALITY OF THE PE PROGRAM OR THE TEACHER. IT MERELY PROVIDES A SNAPSHOT OF THE DIFFERET COHORTS OF STUDENTS AS AN INDICATION OF THE FITESS OF THE STUDENTS.
Find out what's happening in Newarkwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
(Body composition is usually based on BMI, that is an equation with height and weight.)
The Patch wrote last year: "Nearly Four In Ten Newark kids Are Fat. What should we Do" (Tom Abate). I wrote a comment to that: "A Closer Look at 'Nearly Four in Ten Kids are Fat'" where my point was that there are a lot of flaws in the Fitnessgram test and the test is only as good as the executor, and the value of the test is only as good as the person assessing it. And finally it is only justified by what you do with it.
Find out what's happening in Newarkwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
Either you look at how the test is executed at the different schools and find out if it makes sense, or, if you do believe in the numbers it produces, you act accordingly. If the latter is true, the Newark numbers should really cause a state of emergency where you need to put in a program to improve nutrition and exercise for children in Newark. As it is, the test is just a test made for its own sake year after year.
