During the SF city council informational meeting yesterday, the Health Department released a scathing report (Part II) that the people of Sioux Falls are fat, getting fatter, drink too much and don’t eat enough veggies.
Duh.
Even if representative Brian Liss thinks eliminating a food tax would make us fatter, he couldn’t be more wrong. Healthy eating (fresh fruits and veggies) are more expensive to purchase then unhealthy food. Don’t believe me, go look at the dollar menu at most fast food joints. Do you see a side of broccoli or an apple on those menus? It is time SD faced the facts and eliminated the food tax.
But during the meeting councilor Rolfing made a great point about the lack of physical activity in our school system and how PE classes have been cut. I would like to thank Rex for proving my point about building an indoor public pool in conjunction with the school district. Put a public indoor pool at a separate location and it will be under utilized. Build it next to a school and you will get maximum usage. It’s time for separate public entities in our community to start working together on joint projects that not only will save taxpayers time and money but will help eleviate struggles in our community. It seems the county, the city and the school district have this ‘go it alone’ attitude. That kind of attitude doesn’t benefit the community as a whole.
If they want to seriously look at child obesity – they need to start over. Their solution so far is to do fat assessments on kids (including my 7-year-old) in their PE class and then send the report home in their folder. The report then states what these little guys need to change in their diets or activities. My kids ended up fine – but WTH are my kids going to do with these reports? Child obesity comes down to parenting and education. Kids in the elementary schools are given 20 minutes total at lunch including standing in line, eating their lunch, and dumping their trays. This turns into basically 10-12 minutes to literally shove their lunch in their mouths. They are scolded if they even peep a word to their buddy next to them after they have been in nothing but structure since 7:55am. It is a boot camp. The best part is they get out of school at 2:45pm. WTH for? You’re telling me that they can’t be in school until 3:15 and add more minutes for an enjoyable lunch and more physical activity? It’s a joke and one of the #1 things I cannot understand about our schools.
I have often suggested the school day go 8 – 5 like the workday. I have also suggested that there is no summer break. Only a winter and spring break, and maybe a few weeks in the summer. If we are paying teachers for a year’s worth of work. They should work it.
I grew up a few blocks from Horace Mann elementary. My siblings and I would walk over there and play on the playground for hours during the summer. It was an easily accessible neighborhood park that KIDS could get to without needing an adult to drive them there. There was also a great corner shop (Bel-Air Drug) that gave us somewhere to go hang out and buy candy.
Today, some of that playground has been paved over and turned into a parking lot for the school. The drugstore is now a Labor-Ready. If I grew up in the same house today, I probably wouldn’t have anywhere to go play outside other than my own backyard.
If a neighborhood lacks quality public parks and neighborhood PLACES (not just Walgreens or gas stations), then there’s really not much reason to ever go outside your own front door and socialize in the public realm.
If our kids don’t learn how to interact physically in well-functioning neighborhoods, they certainly won’t know how to do it when they are adults. If a kid has to be driven to school and driven to soccer practice and driven to a friend’s house, how do you think he’ll interact with others when he’s grown up?
The sad fact of the matter is that most SF residents (and Americans, for that matter) use their garage doors a lot more often than they use their front doors. That’s the first place we have to look if we want to make a real difference in the obesity epidemic.
Also, my mother is a teacher. They work year-round, whether school is in session or not.
Lewis – the reason your school plan won’t work – Money.
South Dakota will not spend the money needed to make it work.
Here is why it will cost significantly more than it currently does if we follow your plan:
1) Increased infrastructure costs. You will need to Air Condition some of the older schools. You will need to hire more custodians, because they will have fewer hours to do their cleaning and they will need to do the waxing/floor-buffing/gum scraping at different times as opposed to during the summer like they currently do. Call this one extra custodian per elementary school, one and a half per middle school, and two per high school, that’s around 40 new FTE’s.
2) More Teachers. As Tom H. said above – Teachers already work year-round. During the summer, they need to come up with lesson plans, develop new tests, and take college classes to maintain certification. They also are already working 10-12 hours a day during the school year grading papers/preparing lesson plans/doing paperwork. And most of them are currently only paid for 9 months worth of work. They spread the paychecks out over a 12 month period, but they are only paid for 9 months worth of work.
If we keep their workloads the way they are (and they are currently overworked) we’ll need to add around 60% more teachers to cover the 33% increase in hours/day of classes and the 33% increase in class days/year. This would be around 600 additional teachers in the district.
I like what it would do for students educations, but your plan but it will cost more than the city/state are willing to pay.
‘SOME’ teachers work year round. I know several teachers that have the summer off. As for longer school hours, it only makes sense. America falls further and further behind in education because we refuse to invest in education. I’m not stupid, it will cost more money, but investing in education is one of the few things that will pull our country out of the stupidity it is in right now.
As for the pool, I think I made it clear that this would be a ‘partnership’ between the school district and city. In other words the city would have to staff the facility also.
One sentence in that article pissed me off. I believe it’s in the second paragraph where the reporter made a claim that part of the reason we rank so poorly is that South Dakotans answered more honestly than the rest of the country. Really? Where’s the basis for that line?
If anything I find midwesterners to be very wishy-washy. I think we lie just as much as the rest of the country.
Exactly. I get tired of the holier-than-thou we’re better than everybody mentality. Just like anywhere else, there’s good and bad people.
In fact I will go a step farther and say we are less honest. I blame it on ‘church guilt’ I find the more people embrace religion, the less likely they are to admitting fault. Just an observation.
Fat , dishonest, and constipated.
I think you just coined the new name of the EC.
I have been in favor of year round school ever since I was taking my teacher’s training back in the sixties. Kids forget an awful lot in the three months off during the summer. As far as child hood obesity goes, since when is it the schools fault. Let the parents put their foot down and make the kids quit sitting around playing video games and watching TV and get them doing some active stuff. If nothing else have a whole bunch of chores for them to do and have them done to a certain standard. When I was in school the only students that had any physical education were the boys basketball, football, track and cheerleading. That was it. In elementary school the teachers were out on the playground playing organized games with the little kids, games like The Farmer in the Dell, etc. The older kids played softball. Every kid that lived in town walked to school, and none of the high school kids had cars. The country kids rode the school bus, and some of them would walk 2-3 miles home because they could get home before the bus. Kids now act like it is going to kill them to walk one mile. Weight control should be the job of the parents.
You forgot to mention they walked uphill both ways 🙂
You are right about parents teaching kids to eat right and exercise. I see it all the time working in a restaurant. Parents covering everything in ranch, and their little fat kids doing the same. I have no room to talk, I eat shitty. Ironically though I do like veggies, fruit, fish. And never pass up an opportunity to eat at a really good vegetarian place when I travel out of SF. It’s bad habits I guess.
Traffic around the schools is so bad at the beginning and end of the school day that it would be unsafe for children to walk to them. Maybe that bears repeating.
IT IS UNSAFE FOR CHILDREN TO WALK TO SCHOOL.
That should be unsettling in the extreme for all of us. What are we going to do about it?
People are expected to follow traffic laws so they don’t run over children. Daycares are expected to follow rules if they are registered with the city. I think this quote in paper, by the deceased baby’s grandfather said it best;
“If her day care is reopened, I will do everything in my power to shut it down,” he said. “I’ll sit outside her day care 18 hours a day and count the number of kids going in, and every time there’s one over the limit, there will be a call. She will not get by with this crap any longer.”
How sad you have to have grandparents out enforcing the rules of the health department while the Parks department and Code enforcement are measuring people’s tree branches and grass. Stupidity.
About parents/grandparents teaching kids how to eat, last weekend a couple of my girlfriends went to a pizza place for dinner, one of them had her adult daughter and son with, plus a six year old grandaughter and three adult grandchildren. The little six year old is a nice sized little girl, but won’t be for long at the rate I was told she ate that evening. She had four cheesey bread sticks, 2-1/2 slices of pizza and part of a dessert that one member of the party ordered, plus pop. Then they went downtown to the free movie in the park, and the same little girl ate a whole box of popcorn and had a bottle of pop besides. For her there just isn’t any sharing. The little girl’s Dad was there and he didn’t say a thing. One of my girlfriends tried to limit what the child ate, but every time she did something she got a dirty look from the grandma. Both women and myself have weight problems.
Pop is the worst. If you are going to limit anything, that is what you should watch. A 20 oz. Cola has 1 cup of sugar in it.
Eliminate pop from the school premises? Nah, too much money lost from extracurricular donations by Pepsi and others if that happens. Overweight sedentary kids slurping corn syrup, how can life get any better than that?