Obesity Crisis:
NEA today, October/November 2010
“Students who are healthy learn better, are better able to concentrate on their work, have better attendance and perform better in class.” People are trying to teach healthy life skills, which is hard to do when students are being fed muffins, breakfast bars, and juice. Some students are opting for the apple and the orange juice (but few are). I worry about child obesity because my sister is a person that has been battling obesity her entire life. We always had a nice breakfast at home, and we made our lunches for school. But like most students the exchange of food happened pretty often. Exchanging a healthy apple for a bag of chips. Schools across the country are trying to change that. They are not offering “bad” food in vending machines or in the lunch lines. Schools are starting to grow there own food in gardens that the students are taking care of. Shakopee will be doing this as well. Unfortunately it might not make a big enough dent in the food service. Many schools don’t have money for nice food options like fruit and vegetables (to much money for the healthy foods). Research done by USA Today concluded that the meat school use is worse than fast-food chains. The USDA is suppose to be inspecting schools twice a year for there performance, this is not happening because they are not keeping great records, and schools have to pay for the inspection (NO MONEY).
http://www.nea.org/home/37485.htm
To fix this schools are starting to have times during the day where students can workout, have a healthy snack which improves there attendance and performance in class. Schools are changing fundraisers from cookie sales to wrapping paper or magazines. Mrs. Obama has started the “Let’s Move” campaign to get students moving and eating healthy. Her mission is to have 1250 schools participating in her program by June of 2011. To help with this is the US Department of Agriculture, to reduce the amount of fat, sugar, and salt. By raising the amount of whole wheat, fruits and vegetables.
http://www.letsmove.gov/healthierschoolfood.php
Obesity is a growing problem in this country. If we are able to stop now hopefully in the future our students will live a very healthy life. By starting now we can have cooking classes the teach nutritional ways of cooking, health classes that focus more on obesity and what it does to the body. And classes that allow students to attend and take care of gardens where we can eat healthy food. All of these ideas are obtainable, just we get stuck with who is going to pay??
Think about it.

Time

We've already made it through the 1st quarter of the school year. I have no idea how it went so quickly. I don't know about you, but I had a lot of good ideas at the beginning of the year, and I haven't had the time to address/implement a lot of them. I'm sure everyone feels this way. Some of my LD colleagues and I have been discussing the lack of time we have to collaborate with each other and implement all of the things we've been fortunate enough to get some additional training for. I've gotten to attend some really good/relevant professional development workshops, and I always leave them feeling so positive and excited, but when I get back to school and reality sets in (students' daily lessons, accommodations, unexpected problems, not to mention parent concerns/phone calls/emails), the momentum gets lost and frankly so do some of the skills I learned. I wish we had scheduled time during our school day/week/month to spend time with our colleagues planning and training each other with some of the amazing things we have been able to learn about. We have been meeting Friday mornings as a small group (LD teachers) to discuss testing, lessons, student issues, Resource Room concerns, and any other communication needs, but that's not enough time to train each other or really implement any new things. I don't think it's unreasonable to have this opportunity during our paid day because I don't know a single teacher (general ed or special ed) who does not do a lot of planning, grading, due process outside of their contracted day. I really feel this time would be vaulable and would improve not only our daily lessons/curriculum for students, but I think it would have a positive impact on our professional culture as a building and across the district.

Money:

Everyone is interested in money, but as teachers we chose this profession for the students that we teach. Coming into this career we knew that we won’t be making millions, we might not own fancy cars or maybe travel to exotic places but we are in this career because we choose it. So I have a hard time with districts, the state and the nation decreasing the money that we already don’t receive. But with that the government wants us to have opportunities for students (athletics, extracurricular activities, and extra support) so who is going to pay for it??
The reason I bring this up is because of the current elections. Lakeville for example didn’t pass there referendum, so over 90 teachers will lose their jobs. Students will have to pay for athletics, middle school students won’t have extracurricular activities, and what are they to do? Is crime rate, teen pregnancy, drop-out rate all going to increase? The “rich” kids can participate in sports and activities, but what about the kids with parents in the lower economic bracket.
I was reading Minnesota Educator today and it stated that “Districts could feel pinch from recession for decade.” Districts have already laid-off teachers, froze salaries, changed the school week (Northbranch). Shakopee is a growing district, but what is going to happen when we get the next referendum? A new referendum means tax increase, and with people suffering from the recession who really wants to have their taxes raised?
This is a lot to think about, and I am sure that I am not the only one thinking about theses aspects. I luckily don’t have kids yet who might have to deal with these aspects. They might one day unfortunately have to pay for playing in band or shooting a puck around.