Audio clip
Don Thomas
A Georgia House committee on Thursday put off debate on a law that would rate the “health of schools” based on physical education classes and an evaluation of students for the risk of obesity.
But controversy over the bill will not go away, though it has been changed since the first version passed from the Senate with a requirement schools weigh students twice a year and rates schools based on students’ average body mass index.
“What people are opposed to is not what the bill is going to look like,” said Bill Burns, Georgia Advocacy director for the American Heart Association who is lobbying for the bill’s passage. He said changes were made to the legislation that “would make it palatable.”
Senate Bill 506, dubbed the SHAPE bill, had been scheduled for discussion in the House committee for Health and Human Services committee.
It was delayed when the session of the full House ran over into the committee’s start time, Mr. Burns said, and a new date has not yet been set.
Since it passed the Senate in February, though, language was removed that would have required educators to calculate students’ body mass index, a height and weight formula used to calculate the amount of fat on a person.
The changes, approved by sponsor Sen. Joseph Carter, R-Tifton, were made to address the negative reaction the bill generated, Mr. Burns said.
Sen. Don Thomas, R-Dalton, a medical doctor and co-sponsor of the bill, said he shared some of the educators’ concerns, but that the idea is a good one.
“We’d like to put more physical activity in schools at all levels,” Sen. Thomas said, “but the day gets so crowded with academic demands that it is difficult.”
Mr. Burns said Senate Bill 506 would put some teeth in the law to make sure physical education is not neglected.
A Georgia Youth Fitness report found that 87 percent of schools that participated in the report either do not require physical education or do not meet the minimum amount specified by law.
“This is an enforcement issue,” Mr. Burns said. “And there is no mechanism to punish those schools for not adhering to the law.”
State law requires a minimum of 90 hours per school year for kindergarten through fifth grade. The upper grades must complete one unit of physical education in each division.
The average amount of physical education available in area elementary schools is over 50 hours per year, school administrators said.
“When you have one p.e. instructor for 600 students, then usually a good rule of thumb is they get p.e. about once every three days,” said Mike Culberson, former principal of Stone Creek Elementary School in Walker County.
The proposed law would measure a school’s students and make the information available to parents, as well as publish it in aggregate form on the state Department of Education Web site.
Educators said they support the intent, but object to being held responsible for a student’s weight.
“My concern is having the time to do it in school and then being held accountable for what (students) do outside of school,” Mr. Culberson said.
Sen. Thomas said the legislation would raise awareness of the need for exercise.
“We hope it will encourage the schools to offer more education as far as a healthy diet and the importance of exercise goes,” he said. “And we hope it will call attention of the parents to health hazards of obesity.”
Sen. Preston Smith, R-Rome, voted against the bill in the Senate.
“It’s another example of the scope of government usurping the role of the parents,” Sen. Smith said, calling the steps the acts of a “nanny state.”
The bill “rightly recognizes” there is an obesity problem among young people, but the legislature should not be crafting a solution for every problem, he said.
