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Obesity And The Schools


Walking home from school, fifth-grader Angel Rivera, who is stout and shorter by a head than the three girls he was with, volunteered that he likes the fruit punch best of the drinks in the new Snapple vending machine in his school, P.S. 134, on the Lower East Side. It's the sweetest, he says, and he needs his sugar.

Until this semester, he wouldn't have been able to get it. There weren't any vending machines in P.S. 134, or in most of the elementary schools in New York City. That is changing now that the city has a deal giving Snapple exclusive rights to sell juice and water in the city's public schools.

Giving Angel access to such a sweet beverage during the school day may not be in his best interests. Even though the Snapple in schools - unlike the Snapple in the corner grocery store - is all fruit juice and vitamin-fortified, it still packs more calories than soda. Angel isn't worried about calories. But health and education officials are.

On the opposite end of Manhattan, in Washington Heights, a girl visits her pediatrician, Dr. Paula Elbirt. The girl is eight years old, and weighs 200 pounds. She has what used to be called adult-onset diabetes. "They don't call it 'adult onset' anymore because children are getting it," said Elbirt. "They just call it Type II diabetes now." It's one of a host of health problems that are a direct result of a nationwide epidemic of obesity.

New York City public schoolchildren are particularly hard-hit by this epidemic, according to a study by the New York City Department of Health: 24 percent of those aged six to 11 are obese, compared to 15 percent nationally.

If the school system, with its 1.1 million students, had nothing else to worry about, maybe it could focus more on helping heavy children. But the schools are seriously overcrowded and understaffed. There are too few resources to promote quality education, never mind healthy weight. Still, school officials say they are taking action. Officials tout:
• healthier, lower-fat lunches being served this year
• a new free breakfast program
• new physical education programs
• snack machines stripped of junk food

and that lucrative contract with Snapple to sell juice rather than soda.

On the other hand, critics say, some school policies actually exacerbate the problems:
• Many playgrounds in overcrowded schools are clogged with trailers containing extra classrooms, leaving little space for exercise.
• Many schools don't have gym classes, nor enough personnel to supervise recess.

And then there's that lucrative contract with Snapple.

WHY NEW YORK CITY KIDS ARE FAT

Most observers offer the obvious explanations for the high rates of childhood obesity: Too many kids sit around watching television and eating fast foods.

"It used to be that exercise was cheap"--more workers did manual labor as part of their jobs--"and food was expensive," says Dr. Elbirt, medical director of the Children's Aid Society. "Now exercise is expensive and food is cheap. You can buy a lot of junk food that is very filling."

That doesn't explain why New York City public school children have higher weights than the national average. One reason is that obesity tends to afflict low-income households, and that describes the majority of students in NYC public schools; 75 percent of them qualify for free or reduced-rate lunches. (Many affluent NYC children go to private schools, which weren't surveyed.)

One of the major problems for low-income children is hunger and, paradoxically, families who experience periodic hunger--when small paychecks or food stamps run out--have high rates of obesity. They fill up on high-fat, high-calorie (but lower-nutrient) food when they can. Nutritionists call the phenomenon food insecurity. Ironically, says nutritionist Fern Gale Estrow, "malnourishment and obesity may go hand in hand."

 

Measuring Obesity

To determine if an adult is obese, health officials use a formula called Body Mass Index that factors in height and weight. The levels indicating obesity are the same for men and women of all ages. But these change for children as they age--and they are also different for boys and girls, reports the Centers for Disease Control, which uses a series of charts to show the differences. For instance, the charts show that the average 10-year-old boy is 4 foot, 8 inches tall and weighs about 70 pounds. At 100 pounds, he is considered obese.

The Centers for Disease Control provide separate worksheets to determine Body Mass Index for boys (in pdf format) and girls (in pdf format).

Since overweight children tend to turn into overweight adults, the charts can be useful for determining whether a child is at risk.

The Centers for Disease Control do not define children as obese in their charts, but as overweight. "Obesity usually indicates a longer-term condition. We don't want to classify children early on as obese. There's a lot of stigma attached," says Diane Thompson, who helped to develop the charts. The American Obesity Association and the New York City Health Department in its survey of New York City public schoolchildren use the same charts, but they do use the term obese to describe the most overweight children.

Lack of exercise is also more of a problem in poor neighborhoods, too. Safety concerns might keep children inside--and inactive--outside of school hours.

The survey of New York City children found that Hispanics had the highest rate of obesity--31 percent. The rate among black children was 23 percent, while it was 16 percent among whites and 14 percent among Asians.

In Hispanic and black communities, studies show higher social acceptance of heavy people than in white communities. Scientists point out that many Hispanics carry genes that help them to store fat and use calories efficiently. That adaptation came about during centuries of rural life with uncertain food supplies. Today, the constant availability of food has tuned their "thrifty gene" from a survival mechanism into a predisposition to overweight.

Given this array of causes and effects in New York, nobody lays the epidemic of obesity entirely at the feet of the school system. Still, charges City Councilmember Eva Moskowitz, head of the council's education committee, "the schools have been unhelpful in addressing the problem."

SCHOOL FOOD

The Department of Education sees it differently, pointing in particular to the new school lunches. Marty Oestreicher, head of the Office of School Support Services, says the cafeterias maintain standards above those recommended by the United States Department of Agriculture, which funds school lunches.

This school year, the menus look the same as they did before, but there's less fat, no more than 30 percent of the calories offered per day. The cafeterias also serve fresh or frozen (rather than canned) fruits and vegetables five days a week, up from three days a week last year. Including lunches and the new free breakfast program, the schools serve 800,000 meals a day. The only trouble is the taste. "It's not particularly appetizing, though it's scientifically nutritious," says Moskowitz.

Carmen Santana, the parent of a 7th grader at IS 119 in Queens, agrees. She sampled a New York City school lunch a couple of weeks ago. It was "some kind of compressed hamburger" and the roll "tasted fermented." Last summer, when she tried a breakfast, she got a battered box of Cheerios, chocolate milk to put on it, and a muffin. "It's institutional, like mini-prisons. It's horrible, it's insulting," said Santana, who is a board member on the Commission on the Public Health System in New York City.

Her son, Cameron Gonzalez, usually throws away most of his lunch, he says, and his friends skip lunch altogether.

There is at least anecdotal evidence that this is widespread. It's hard to know what the kids are getting from the school lunches nutritionally because there is no formal measurement of what gets eaten and what gets thrown out. Oestreicher says he gets information about the most popular foods anecdotally from the food managers and kitchen staff, and by visiting school cafeterias himself around the city. "Today I had the chicken parmigiana, fish nuggets and macaroni. I was looking around and the kids were eating it."

But pediatrician Paula Elbirt has also visited school cafeterias, and she sees students throwing away a lot of food: "The kids are throwing away the apple and the banana. They're eating the hamburger and the bun--or just the bun with lots of ketchup on it."

Kelsie Jameson, a fifth grader at P.S. 134, is indignant about some of what is offered: "I'll eat vegetables--but cold broccoli?" she says. A few times she's got fruit she couldn't identify. That would be a throwaway.

SNAPPLE

To the Department of Education, its deal with Snapple giving the beverage-maker the exclusive right to put vending machines in the schools has at least two benefits - it will bring in revenue, and, educators hope, it will foster healthier habits.

Before Snapple, each school made its own deal for vending machines. In some cases, the machines held drinks that weren't up to United States Department of Agriculture requirements for schools, says Oestreicher. "The only way to control the situation was to have a central contract." The sponsorship will mean at least $3 million a year.

And the new vending machines--Oestreicher estimates that 1,400 have been installed so far and another 300 are on order--sell only juice and water. (School officials said they did not know how many of these machines were going into elementary schools, as opposed to high schools or middle schools -- an odd admission of ignorance, considering that one of the points of the contract was to give officials more control.)

But critics knock the Snapple deal for the very reasons that education officials tout it. Several public officials question the contract, Assemblyman Steve Sanders saying the lack of competitive bidding makes it "smack of a sweetheart deal," and City Comptroller William Thompson calling on the Department of Education to cancel the contract. Ellen Raider, a member of the People's Coalition to Take Back the Schools, objects to "the commercialization of the kids' minds by having product ads all over the place."

Others object on nutritional grounds. Though the Snapple juices do have added vitamins and nutrients, they are reportedly even more calorie-laden than Coca-Cola

Nutritionist Estrow would rather see juices than soda in the schools, but she worries. "Children won't know the difference between Snapple in the school, which is juice, and Snapple outside, which is sugar water." (Commercial Snapple fruit drinks do contain 5 percent to 10 percent juice, but not 100 percent, as the school vending contract requires.)

Even pure fruit juice is not great for kids if they drink more than 8 to 12 ounces a day, says Estrow. "Why are we encouraging our kids to drink juice? Why not eat fruit?"

Unswayed by the criticism, the Department of Education plans to secure Snapple-like sponsorships for snack vending machines. Though there are not yet system-wide contracts that would bring in sponsorship revenues, the machines now in schools are supposed to maintain nutritional standards adopted in June--no chocolate candy, jellied candy, or gum. Baked potato chips rather than fried are allowed, as are pretzels.

PHYSICAL EDUCATION

Good nutrition goes just part of the way to keep New York schoolchildren growing taller rather than wider. They have to get moving, too. That is hard in New York City. With overcrowding, many schools lack the facilities to fulfill the state requirements for physical education--every day through third grade, three times a week for 4th to 6th graders, and two to three times a week for grades 7 to 12.

There is no "consistent physical education program" in 41 percent of New York's public elementary schools, reported the New York Times Magazine recently.

One reason for the lack of physical activity in the city's 673 elementary schools, according to a study by State Assemblyman Jeff Klein's oversight committee, is that many of them do not have functioning playgrounds; that space is filled with "temporary" trailers for extra classrooms needed for these overcrowded schools. Some of the trailers have been there for as long as eight years.

A bill Klein introduced in the Assembly requires that any loss of playground space be compensated with comparable space elsewhere. "It's a very simple concept. If you take away space, you have to give it back." Klein would like to see Snapple revenues funding the playground space.

In the meantime, nearby parks could theoretically substitute for the school playground space. But Cecilia Blewer, who is president of her daughter's school, P.S. 163, says because of the layoffs of paraprofessionals and teacher's aides, there isn't anyone to accompany the children: "I have this school a block and a half from Central Park. We don't have the personnel to take the kids to the park. We can't get there. You see the private school kids in the park."

The lack of personnel means that even in those schools where students have a place to play, recess is a time of chaos, not necessarily of physical activity. "You have maybe 200 kids being supervised by three adults," Blewer said.

Mindful of the problems, the Department of Education has just launched a centralized effort to revamp the physical education program, headed by Lori Benson in a newly created position, the Director of Fitness and Physical Development. Benson, who has been a New York City teacher, a "Fit for Life" coordinator and Deputy Director of Public School Athletic Leagues, is rolling out the new program in Southern Queens and Northwest Brooklyn.

The program is filled with upbeat acronyms: The core is called CHAMPS--Cooperative, Healthy, Active, Motivated, Positive Students. The first portion is called PROJECT F.I.T.--Fitness Integrating Technology.

Benson realizes she has to be creative to overcome some of the conditions. In schools that don't have a gym--or where the gym has been taken over for classrooms or lunchrooms--the program will work with "non-traditional facilities," says Benson. "A lot of times there's a smaller multipurpose room, the stage of an auditorium, even the aisles of the auditorium could be used to set up fitness circuits. It's something we have to be creative as possible about."

She also has to be creative about organizing after-school programs including a citywide intramural program for middle schools. She's starting nearly from scratch and without money. "There are a lot of after-school programs, but they're sporadic," she says.

AFTERSCHOOL, BEFORE SCHOOL

A "recess enhancement program" aims to jump into the breach of playground anarchy. Chris Capobianco, a former Peace Corps volunteer, is the recess enhancement coordinator for Asphalt Green, a sports and fitness nonprofit organization on the Upper East Side. Through a federal grant, staff members regularly visit 21 schools in Manhattan and Queens. Half are in Harlem.

They train student leaders to work with kids in their own age group with cooperative games and lessons about sportsmanship and teamwork. One game, Alaskan kickball, incorporates each child on every play.

But many who work with children believe that school programs are not enough, nor even afterschool programs. It is far better to reach children before they even start school. "If you wait until you establish eating habits, the kind of expectations as to what a meal is, you're too late," says Dr. Elbirt. That is why the Children's Aid Society last month launched an early obesity prevention program for Headstart pre-schoolers and their parents at two community public schools in Washington Heights.

Very young children will reach for the apple or string bean that older children shun, says Dr. Elbirt. Familiarity breeds fondness. If the fresh fruits and vegetables aren't available in the neighborhood, though, the children and their parents won't develop the habit of eating them. The staff at the Children's Aid Society talks area stores into carrying fruits and vegetables. With the parents, they also encourage walking for exercise. "If they live in an unsafe neighborhood, they're not going to walk. We've identified a little park for them to walk in, right along the FDR drive."

Another early education program, Cookshop, a Community Food Resource Center project at P.S. 261 in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, shows young children and their parents how to cook and eat New York-grown produce.

Programs like Cookshop and the one run by the Children's Aid Society show what kinds of partnerships could be created in the schools to slow the growth of children's girth. Foundation and government grants and charitable donations fund these efforts. Regular funding for widespread prevention and education programs is not likely. In the overcrowded, underfunded public schools, for the moment, modest efforts to improve health will have to do.

###

Resources

• Action for Healthy Kids
• Cutbacks of School Physical Education Programs (2000) (Gotham Gazette)
• Epidemic of Fat Children (Gotham Gazette)
• School Reforms 2003 (Gotham Gazette)
• Diabetes (Gotham Gazette)
• The Underside of Bloomberg's School Reform (Village Voice)
• Advocates for Children

 

 

After School Programs


The afterschool program at my daughter’s school, PS 261 in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, is one of the school's strongest selling points. At 3:00 p.m. on Thursdays, when her kindergarten class ends, her teacher walks her down the hall to her creative drama class, which is taught by a professional actress. It was a hard choice, given that my daughter also wanted to take tap dancing and I wanted her to learn Spanish. When she gets a little older she can get homework help, learn to play chess, or cook with the owner of one of Brooklyn’s best restaurants. Almost all of the two dozen classes offered daily are taught by the school’s teachers or other professionals in their fields.

A third of the 780 students in the school attend the program, which costs $12 a day; families get a discount for more than one child in the program. But since there’s almost no scholarship money available and half the school is eligible for free lunch, it seems likely that many families simply can’t afford the cost.

So what do kids do from 3:00 p.m. until their parents return from work? “There are a million kids in New York City public schools and a million individual solutions,” says Susan Holman, a PS 261 parent and the treasurer of its after school program. “People use nannies, grandparents, older siblings, college students, swapping with friends, taking kids to work with you. It’s an incredible patchwork, and the reason it is that there’s no consistent coherent approach.”

While the lack of centralized data or funding makes it difficult to find how many children are in after school programs in New York City, an estimated 215,000 children in New York City ages 6 to 13 come home from school without a family member to watch them, according to the advocacy group Citizen Action of New York.

After school programs are often created locally, from within a school’s parent body or out of a partnership between an individual school and a community-based organization, such as the Boys and Girls Clubs or the YM and YWCAs, which often receive public funds.

It’s impossible to keep track of every after school program in the city--although the Partnership for Afterschool Education makes a good stab at it through its extensive guide. So it’s difficult to know if programs will have the funds to return the next year and it’s unpredictable which school gets a program and which neighborhood has none.

What is clear is that many programs are threatened. Because of a budget battle in Albany over funding for after-school, 14 programs in New York City serving 2,175 students have been eliminated entirely and 27 have had their funding reduced by a quarter or more.In addition to the state, funding for afterschool programs can also come from the federal government, which just approved $1 billion nationwide, primarily to pay for its 21st Century Community Learning Centers. But the New York City Department of Education also funds afterschool programs through its Office of Youth Development and School and Community Services, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed cutting $10.5 million from New York City’s after school programs last year. In response, the Open Society Institute, which created the Afterschool Corporation in 1998, gave $20 million to New York City to support after school programs it runs for city schools. The donation inspired the mayor to reinstate the cut funds, which combined with the Soros money is dispersed by the Afterschool Corporation in the form of grants to local programs.

Study after study shows that structured after school programs, from tap dancing and chess for elementary school kids to homework help and substance abuse prevention for teenagers, improve children’s experience in school--their attendance, their attitude, even their academic performance and graduation rate. A California study showed the reading and math scores of children in after school programs improved at twice the rate of all students nationwide, for instance.

Children who are set loose at the end of the school day have been shown to be more likely to smoke, use drugs and alcohol, be truant from school and have poor grades, according to the After-School Corporation. Juvenile violence and crime jump after school lets out; teenagers with nowhere to go are 37 percent more likely to become parents.

And taxpayers are in favor of it. A new poll released late last month by the Afterschool Alliance found that voters in general are overwhelmingly willing to use taxpayer money and even pay more in taxes to fund after school programs.

“The days of school getting out early so the students could go home to milk the cows are long past, but our policies still reflect those origins,” says PS 261’s Susan Holman. “Clearly our school calendar does not match the reality of today’s working conditions.”

Sasha Nyary, formerly on the staff of Life Magazine, edits the newsletter of The Fifth Avenue Committee, a community-based organization.

 

The New High Schools Admissions Process


By November 14th, thousands of New York City eight graders must submit official applications listing their high school choices. The Department of Education has scheduled new information forums for parents and students in each borough. Chancellor Klein and company are belatedly trying to stem some of the confusion that has arisen from the initiation of a new high school admissions process at the beginning of the school year.

The new high schools admissions process was implemented this fall with neither public announcement nor public vetting. As students, parents, guidance counselors, and administrators at both middle and high schools scrambled to learn the details of the new policy, misinformation and frustration reigned. Only now are people starting to understand the new system.

The new admissions process was designed to be fairer to more of the 100,000 students who apply to public high schools each year. Beginning this year, students will rank 12 schools on their applications in order of preference. Unlike previous years, high schools will make their acceptance decisions without knowing how their school was ranked on a student's application. A complex computer program will match up students with their highest ranked school that also accepts them. The program is designed like the one that matches medical school graduates with residency programs (though the mechanics of the schools' matching process have not been made public). There are no more waiting lists. The one school with which a student is matched will be the only option students will be offered unless they are accepted into one of the specialized high schools, which have separate admissions processes.

Few would question the need to reform the city schools' high schools admissions process, which, in previous years, gave top students several school choices but sent thousands of other students to schools not on their list of preferences at all. Klein and company addressed the problem quickly, but they have provided limited public explanation or justification of the details. And they have not adequately prepared for the effects of the changes. The result is considerable anxiety for parents and schools alike.

What can the Department of Education learn from this?

School personnel must be able to provide accurate information about new policies. Some families found sound, reliable information about the new policies, like Insideschools.org and the Web site and handbooks produced by the Department of Education. However, many others depended on school personnel who, not infrequently, gave out wrong or contradictory information.

Better school data are needed too. Because students must list 12 high school choices (instead of five in previous years), they and their families need to learn about many more options. With students selecting a larger number of schools, they will have to look further afield, beyond the schools with which they or people around them may be familiar. To help, the high school directory should include school safety information and other basic information about school conditions now listed only as statistics on school report cards. In addition, if schools are going to continue to give preference to certain students, the directory should not only state schools' priority groups but should also give data about how many students beyond those groups are actually accepted.

Students and parents must be able to get a firsthand look at the schools. This year, schools were totally unprepared for the much larger number of students and parents attending scheduled high school open houses and tours. As a result, many of these sessions have been overcrowded and many schools unable to accommodate the number of families that wanted to visit. In the future, schools must be accessible and offer sufficient tours and open houses to accommodate prospective students and parents.

All families need to know schools' true admissions processes. As might be expected, both parents and schools are jostling to gain whatever advantage they can under the new system: They are trying to figure out how to maximize the chances that they will get their top choices, whether of schools or of students. Parents report that some schools are trying to retain the advantages they had under the old system by creating ways for students "in the know" to submit additional information about their preferences and qualifications. Many parents welcome this because they are worried that, with a larger pool of applicants, schools will make their choices based on a more limited set of criteria, judging students solely by tests scores, grades, and attendance records. But these practices may put families who go by the book at a disadvantage.

With such a wide variety of New York City public high schools, the choice of a high school is a very important one. Many city high schools are just plain bad, and many more are mediocre. Even among the good schools, there are important differences--in size, in philosophy, in curricular and extracurricular offerings. Is the reform going to be a real improvement? No one can yet say whether the new system will get the intended results or what other unintended consequences may arise. The new admissions process may ensure that the system by which students are distributed to schools is fairer to more students. Unfortunately, no admissions process is going to solve the basic problem that there are not nearly enough good high schools to go around.

Jessica Wolff is a public school parent and the director of policy development at the Campaign for Fiscal Equity.
Josh Simons is an artist and designer with two children in the public schools. The views expressed are their own.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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