A new gadget will be clipped to the waistbands of Fairfax County Public Schools students next year, and no, it’s not a strange revival of the beeper. Rather, school officials will equip kids with pedometers, which they will be expected to wear sunup to sundown, up to 35 days per school year. The small electronics will track how many steps the child takes each day as part of a $2.1 million federal grant to track students’ nutrition and physical activity over three years.
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Elizabeth Payne, FCPS’s coordinator of health and physical education, said the Carol M. White Physical Education Program grant is adding “a more explicit focus” to the school system’s existing lessons in health and physical education. The result: the Living Fit in Fairfax project.
Students will keep nutrition and activity logs, and the school system will collect additional information on fitness and nutritional knowledge, while implementing a more extensive health and physical education curriculum. And then there are the pedometers, which students in kindergarten through fourth grade will wear for 20 days each school year, and older children will sport for 35 days. However, parents can say they don’t want their children to participate outside of physical education class time.
Ryan Gorman, a Fairfax City nurse practitioner who treats obesity issues, said she believed the pedometers could be “kind of a fun way” for kids and adolescents to learn about exercise, but cautioned that the lessons have to be age-appropriate.
“A 5-year-old may see it as more of a toy, but I think a lot of information can be translated,” Gorman said.
Elementary school students currently receive 60 to 90 minutes of physical education each week, with older students taking on 47-to-90-minute blocks up to five times a week.
It’s been a hot topic in the county. Last year, Fairfax school officials rallied against a bill that would have mandated 150 minutes of physical education per week for all elementary and middle school students, saying it would force them to extend the school day, cut other programs and ultimately become an unfunded mandate. Gov. Bob McDonnell vetoed the bill.
Last school year, Fairfax introduced $100 sports fees for student athletes.
Supervisor Pat Herrity, R-Springfield, said he was frustrated that the schools had sought funds to document a problem he believes is self-evident. “It seems to me that money could be better spent eliminating some of the barriers that we put in place to the kids actually participating in sports,” he said.
