Moving kids from fat to fit
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health promotion.
Though the current statistics paint a grim picture, Schafer says Springfield is one community poised to change its course.
“I think Springfield fits in with the rest of the state as far as there’s a problem and we’re all aware of it. I think what makes Springfield unique is a group like genH and the school district,” Schafer says. “The thing that makes us so optimistic about Springfield is the willingness of this group of people who have the time and the passion to put forward a program that will ultimately help kids today and the rest of their lives.”
Continuing with their own initiatives in concert with genH, organizations including St. John’s Hospital, Southern Illinois University School of Medicine and Lincoln Land Community College serve as anchor partners with District 186 and other Sangamon County schools in the common goal of encouraging childhood wellness.
Kimberly Luz serves as St. John’s Hospital’s education outreach coordinator and as genH’s education action team leader. In one of its latest efforts to fight childhood obesity, the hospital has developed an interactive map of Route 66 at www.kidsncontrol.org that anyone can use to log physical activity. Luz says the hope is that teachers will use it to teach about locations along the route while logging an entire classroom’s efforts to stay active.
The program is the result of an $86,900 grant from Kohl’s Department Store, which St. John’s chose to dedicate toward childhood wellness efforts after the revelation several years ago that 26 percent of Springfield kindergartners were overweight or obese. That percentage only increased as students progressed through school, with 35 percent of fifth graders and 38 percent of high school students overweight or obese.
“It shows kids getting bigger and bigger and bigger as they go on to the next grade level. So that’s pretty interesting data,” Luz says, noting that those numbers are several years old. The hospital is now working with a vendor to update those statistics, which should be available later this fall.
Sarraf says schools – which feed many children two meals a day and have kids’ attention for most of their waking hours – can help combat the trend St. John’s numbers show, though they shouldn’t be expected to do it alone. Sarraf says that genH operates on the assumption that all schools are already overworked and underfunded.
“I agree with those teachers who look at me when I talk to them about increasing physical activity for kids and improving nutrition and say, ‘That’s great, Doc, but that’s your job. My job is to teach them.’ And I agree with them,” Sarraf says. “What I have worked very hard and diligently to do, through continuing education for teachers, is to teach them that the data show unequivocally that children who are well-nourished every single day during the school day, who are physically active multiple times every day during the school day, perform better academically.”
“We have never created a program and then handed it to the schools and asked them to do it,” Sarraf says, commending dozens of volunteers who’ve signed on to the genH cause. “We are asking for access, that’s it.”
It’s an approach educators say has been ideal. “GenH has a lot of wind behind its sails, because it’s a coalition that when they say they’re going to do something, they’re going to do it,” says Rick Sanders, District 186 physical education coordinator. Sanders oversees several wellness programs made possible by a $150,000 CATCH (Coordinated Approach to Child Health) grant from the Illinois Department of Public Health, including a series of wellness fairs organized by genH and St. John’s Hospital.
When genH was just getting off the ground, St. John’s had already been working to develop kiosks about healthy living, so it was only natural that St. John’s and genH partner to bring wellness fairs to area schools, Luz says. After holding all-day wellness fairs for students at participating schools last year, the organizations also put on family health fairs where Lincoln Land Community College chefs demonstrated healthy cooking to parents and St. John’s offered hundreds of dollars worth of free health screening. The fairs allow kids to see everything from martial arts instruction to real hearts and smokers’ lungs.
“They don’t say, ‘Well, we want this, but you have to do all the work.’ With this health fair, which was a component of the grant to have the health fairs, it would have been very challenging for 24 individual schools, or this office, to pull off what genH has done with all their stations,” Sanders says.
Sarraf says she works first to gain buy-in on the individual school level, and has done so by giving 90-minute presentations at least once to every District 186 elementary school as continuing education for teachers.
After sitting through one of Sarraf’s presentations just prior to last school year, Hazel Dell staff members immediately chose to ban chocolate milk – which is high in sugar – from its cafeterias, says Leila Hosseinali, a second grade teacher at the school. During the presentation, Sarraf showed an image of several sugar cubes representing the amount of sugar in one chocolate milk.
“Seeing it like that was kind of surprising for us,” Hosseinali says, noting that many students were getting a double dose of chocolate milk when they ate both breakfast and lunch at the school. “It just started a conversation right then and there – what steps can we do as a staff and a school to make some small changes to help out our kids?” Besides removing chocolate milk, Hazel
