Moving kids from fat to fit
The Springfield campaign to promote healthy food and exercise
EDUCATION | Rachel Wells
This school year, in a little patch of yard beside a set of mobile classrooms at Southern View Elementary School, students and their teachers are hoping to find a few new flavors. As a way to teach students about health and wellness, the District 186 school is building a garden in a sunny spot that last spring surprised passers-by with a few bright red wild strawberries.
“It’s fertile,” Southern View principal Jonnell Baskett says about the patch of grass that is to become the school’s vegetable garden, which is meant to broaden students’ food horizons. If students can take ownership of the garden, they’ll be more inclined to try the fresh fruits and vegetables they grow, educators hope. And once they try the healthy foods – which some students are not exposed to in convenience-driven homes – students will ask their parents to purchase them instead of sweet and salty treats with little to no nutritious value.
“We had somebody who came and talked to us about a garden a couple of years ago,” Baskett says. Even then, she thought it was a great idea, until reality struck – among other roadblocks, the school doesn’t own a tiller, needed for breaking ground. The proposed garden was canceled.
This year, however, the garden will grow – or, at least, Southern View will plant it in hopes that seeds will sprout. “All I have is the black thumb of death,” Baskett says, explaining that Southern View is relying on the genH Coalition to bring a tiller and to help make the garden successful.
The genH Coalition (“Generation Healthy”) formed about three years ago in response to the nation’s growing childhood obesity rate that advocates say will eventually threaten everything from the economy to national defense. The coalition is run on the energy of Dr. Kemia Sarraf, about two dozen dedicated volunteers and the work of its anchor partners – St. John’s Hospital, Lincoln Land Community College, Sangamon County Medical Society Alliance, District 186 and the Illinois Department of Public Health, to name just a few.
As an umbrella organization, genH facilitates networking and cooperation among organizations independently committed to health and wellness and works to educate schools, families and the general public about the benefits of proper nutrition and physical activity. With one paid staff member – executive director Brandy Moore Grove, whose $20,000 salary is paid for by a gift from the St. John’s Foundation – genH’s initiatives, from health fairs to cooking demonstrations, are made possible through grants and donations of time and money from individuals and businesses.
“What I have seen since I moved here, and continue to see, is that Illinois is ranked number four in the country with regards to the percentage of our children who are either overweight or obese – number four,” says Sarraf, genH founder and president, the mother of four and a board-certified internist. She and her husband, Jeffrey Goldstein, an interventional cardiologist at St. John’s Prairie Heart Institute, moved to Springfield about eight years ago. Prior to that, Sarraf worked on obesity and diabetes issues in Salt Lake City with the Indian Health Service.
“The statistics show it is very unlikely that a child who is overweight or obese will overcome their weight problems as an adult,” Sarraf says. With obesity comes greater risk for an onslaught of other health problems, including heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes.
“If the trends continue as they are today, kids being born now are going to live a shorter lifespan than their parents. It would be the first time that would happen in U.S. history,” says Tom Schafer, deputy director of the Illinois Department of Public Health’s office of health promotion.
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