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When the pupils at the Hilton Head School for the Creative Arts head hit the school grounds for play time, they have more than the traditional slides and swings at their disposal.
An award-winning fitness trail is intended to the challenge
their physical abilities, while instilling a lifelong passion for staying fit.
Childhood obesity has been identified as one of the primary challenges of the 21st century. From the First Lady pledging to tackle the issue head on, to retired military officers warning that today’s youth are “too fat to fight,” the nation has heard the call to action.
And it is not without evidence. With medical costs soaring, obesity has been linked to costly scourges like diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease.
Cynthia Hayes, Student Services Officer for the Beaufort County School District, says the local schools, like all schools in South Carolina have been called to take on obesity.
In 2009, the state passed the Comprehensive Health Education Act, a measure “carried out with the purpose of maintaining, reinforcing, or enhancing the health, health-related skills, and health attitudes and practices of children and youth.”
Locally, Hayes explains, this has taken shape with the creation of the district’s Health and Wellness Committee, a group that includes individuals from the school district, the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, and local medical facilities.
Their challenge, she says, is to create programs that integrate healthy living with the educational experience. To do this, the district has identified “Wellness Champions” at each of the schools. The Wellness Champion, Hayes says, “is typically a PE teacher, a school nurse, or someone else at the school who has a real interest in teaching children about living well.”
At the school level, Wellness Champions are working to get children moving more and eating better. This can mean organizing active periods throughout the day, with the goal of getting children moving 90 minutes every day. It can also mean working with parents to replace the sugary empty calories so often associated with birthdays with healthier snack options.
One of the key components of the health push has been a partnership with Eat Smart, Move More of South Carolina, a coalition with the goal of creating “sustainable efforts to support healthy eating and active living where South Carolinians live, learn, work and play,”
Hayes says that this partnership provides the school with the resources of a group that has to expertise to create programs that work.
One area that has already started to show progress, she says, has been to turn off the school vending machines that dispense sugary drinks so that students consume water rather than soft drinks while at school.
“The real goal is to make this a community effort,” Hayes says. “This is something that has tobecome part of the student’s lives, it can’t just start and stop at the school door.”
Did you know?
A terrific book that holds lots of surprises and offers alternatives for everything from cupboard staples to food in restaurants is “Eat This, Not That!” Consider these nuggets:- Choosing prime rib over baby back ribs at Outback will save you more than 2,000 calories.
- You can save nearly 500 calories and more than 20 grams of fat just by ordering your banana split at Dairy Queen instead of Baskin-Robbins.
- A Stouffer’s White Meat Chicken Pot Pie has as much saturated fat as 6 scoops of ice cream?
