Officials weigh in on pupils' obesity

Bills would require weight checks at schools

Uncool clothes. The wrong friends. Bad skin. No date.

Navigating the social land mines of adolescence can be stressful enough, some say, without kids also having to worry about officials measuring their fat.

Bills working their way through the Maryland General Assembly this year would require public schools to screen pupils for signs of heaviness and then send the results home to parents in a "health report card."

But opponents - who include the state's major medical and psychiatry organizations as well as parents groups - doubt the value of such testing and say it would be as esteem-boosting as a round of schoolyard dodge ball.

"It further accentuates the idea that weight is of extreme importance," says Dr. Harry Brandt, director of the Center for Eating Disorders at Sheppard Pratt. He predicts that some young people would feel bad enough about their body grades to experiment with the sort of unhealthy behavior that leads to anorexia or bulimia.

"The reality," he says, "is that kids come in all sizes."

The bill's backers say the unfortunate reality, however, is that kids are increasingly coming in one size: XXL.

Because obesity in the United States is getting worse, they say, it makes sense to nip budding weight problems early and to teach kids the difference between reaching for apples and grabbing bags of Cheetos.

Sponsor baffled

"You can't be a good learner if you've got a bad diet," says Sen. Paul G. Pinsky, a Prince George's County Democrat and longtime proponent of getting healthier foods into schools. He says he's baffled by the fire his legislation is drawing.

"Why do people want to block this?" he asks. "I don't get it."

Pinsky's bill and another one pending in the Senate would require local schools to calculate each pupil's body mass index, commonly known as BMI. The number is a way to gauge whether people's weight is appropriate for their height.

Pinsky might better understand the brouhaha if he could see the look on the faces of two Eastern Technical High School seniors told last week that elected officials were considering calculating kids' fat.

"It's kind of like against basic human rights!" cried Katie McKay, taking in a high school basketball game in North Baltimore with her friend Ashley Anderson. The pony-tailed two of them look as though they've never had a weight worry in their lives. And yet, they're appalled.

"You're gonna have the sort-of-overweight kids and the really skinny kids and they're all gonna feel bad," McKay says.

"I actually think it will make kids more depressed at school," Anderson agrees. She thinks a better idea would be for schools to offer confidential weight-loss programs for students who want to slim down. That and fixing the cafeteria's "disgusting" lunch choices.

"It's all fattening," she says. "I think the fries should just be gone."

If Maryland institutes BMI screenings, it would join a handful of states that have started the practice, including Pennsylvania. In 2003, Arkansas became the first state to require its schools to chart BMI.

Parents in Arkansas did not take kindly to the fat measurements. In fact, last year state lawmakers tried to have the law repealed. According to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, during the first year of the screenings 13 percent of parents said their children had been teased at school because of the program. This year the taunt-monitor dropped to 9 percent, the paper reported.

More disturbing for some Arkansas officials: The BMI testing has not put a dent in the state's number of overweight kids.

Across the country, an estimated 16 percent of young people between 6 and 19 years old are overweight, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the adult world, that statistic balloons to 65 percent.

The CDC figures that, in Maryland, 29 percent of low-income children between 2 and 5 years old are either overweight or at risk of becoming so.

`Wellness policies'

School officials nationwide are pulling their hair out trying to reverse the trend. If it's not BMI report cards, then it's banning bake sales or hauling out vending machines or rethinking fitness classes.

A deadline later this year for schools to come up with "wellness policies" in order to preserve their federal school lunch funding has only heightened the frenzy, says Dr. Frank Greer, chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics' committee on nutrition.

"Every organization I know of has a task force on obesity," Greer says. "We really don't know if it's going to make any big difference."

The physician wanly praises BMI tests in schools, if only as a way to measure whether or not any of the other initiatives are working. But sending home report cards, he guesses, will be a bust.

"We don't have any idea how parents are going to use the information, or if it will mean anything to them," Greer says. "My suspicion is that many of them will just overlook it. The parents who would be concerned about it are probably concerned about it already."