Should PE be mandatory?

Should Physical Education be Mandatory?

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than one-third of U.S. adolescents and children are obese. 70-80% of these overweight adolescents and children attain this unhealthy status by adulthood. CDC shows that obesity is associated with many other diseases, such as heart disease, cancer, and stroke. Rob Eissler reports of these obese children, “34 children die … every hour”. Let’s quantify the number of children who die in a year – multiply 34 children, who die in an hour, with 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year, the numbers equate to 297,840 deaths within a year. One of the ways to combat such skyrocketing numbers of obesity is to mandate physical education (PE) in all schools for health reasons, despite student health and school funding issues.

How does PE reduce obesity? Described by NutriStrategy, “physical activity helps to reduce body fat by building or preserving muscle mass and improving the body's ability to use calories … combined with proper nutrition, it can help … prevent obesity”. NutriStrategy is an informational website on how and why to improve one’s health. In other words, physical exercise is the manufacturing powerhouse packaging bits and pieces of the load, the fat, until there is no load remaining in the warehouse. Although in a few cases, obesity can attribute to genetics, most aren’t (Watson). That is, obesity can be attributed mostly to environmental influence; it can be controlled. By mandating PE, the risk for diseases among the obese can be dramatically minimized.

On November 15, 2011, a boy died from a heart attack, the supposed source being obese, in front of his classmates at 9:35am at Pellsrus Primary School; he was only nine-years-old (Rooyan). According to Rooyan, he was believed to weigh between 231 and 275 pounds. Although his height was not given, his weight is a serious problem as a child. Do you want your children to end up like this poor young boy?

What comes with support comes with disagreement within the debate of the requisite of PE. Some argue that PE is neither healthfully fit nor absolutely necessary for their children and thus, should not be mandatory. In the former case, Aaron Conor argues some children have asthma and thereby are not fit to engage in physical activity (Conor, 2009). Asthma is an inflammation of the bronchioles of the lungs. In this case, the coach will tell kids with asthma to “deal with it” as if they were all grown men. Conor suggests kids with asthma cannot deal with physical activity.

Who is Conor? He is a freelancer who designs graphic designs and sells photography illustrations. He owns the website jrtmedia.com, where he sells his graphic design photos and photography illustrations and offers arcade games for his visitors. In addition, he has written 197 articles at Helium.com, which is one of the largest editorial communities (Conor, 2009). According to his article, I would consider him as a typical adult, or in others, parents, who is worried about the small minority of children who can’t participate in athletics.

Although Conor does provide invaluable points to not mandate PE, the kid’s problematic situation can be accommodated. Kids with asthma may experience a problem when engaging in physical activity: “increased breathing during exercise cooling and drying of the lining of the air passages”, which are necessary for someone to get exercise-induced asthma (Stern, 2000). As a result, kids start to exhibit shortness of breath and thereby, run less. The kid’s situation can be accommodated with low-intensity exercise. According to The Science of Nutrition textbook, we tend to lose more fat from low-intensity activity, such as walking, except for trained athletes. This occurs because fat stores provide most of the energy we need for the low-intensity activities (Thompson et al., 125). There’s a game called red-light-green-light, in which students run as fast as they can to the other side of the gym when the teacher shouts “green-light”, but when the teacher shouts “red-light” the students must stop. Instead of running, the first change would be to walk as fast as possible. The next change would be to set a building puzzle in the middle of the gym, and all kids who reach that first must complete the puzzle before continuing with the green-light. This puzzle gives students a “break”, which helps asthmatic students decrease breathing and less time for their lungs to cool and dry and thus, less time to develop asthma. A typical gym period lasts an hour; if the students could walk inside the gym for an hour a day, imagine how much fat would be reduced every day. Imagine the reduction in obesity. Imagine the reduction of other diseases. See the connection?

The latter disagreement within this controversy is the insufficient funds to allocate to PE. According to Ryan Hurley, some districts are cutting funds for non-academically tested subjects, such as PE. In New Berlin, fees for PE have increased from $35 to $75 (Hurley 2004). In Janesville high schools, there was initially no fees, but have recently proposed $50 to play sports (Hurley 2004). The reason behind these more than 200% increase in prices is that funds should be shunted from “programs that are not tested” to programs that are tested, implying that PE is not absolutely necessary (Hurley 2004). Therefore, PE should not be mandatory because students would have to pay for this increase in price, and the schools themselves do not have the funds to allocate.

Hurley brings up an interesting point; there are simply insufficient funds to fund PE. The money doesn’t just fall from trees where you can pick it up like leaves. The 2008-2009 school budget distribution of funds for five star schools is 70.64% general (day-to-day activities), 0.21% athletics, and many others for a total expenditure of $524,427,619. Allocation of the funds, however, can be corrected. As one can see, the majority of the fund comes from the day-to-day activities and ONLY 0.21% is allocated to athletics. If schools can take a small proportion of this general day-to-day activities fund and allocate it to athletics, the fees for sports would not increase 200% and can decrease depending on how much of the fund schools allocate. As a result, more students can participate in gym for a much reasonable price.

PE should be mandated for children’s health. CDC has shown that children, who are obese, are subject to an increased risk of health diseases. The good news is schools can reduce this risk if they require all children to participate in physical activity. If they don’t mandate PE, cases of death due to obesity will continue to escalate – more children will die, just like the 9-year-old boy who died in front of his classmates. Mandating PE isn’t a perfect solution, but can be accommodated to meet the requirements of all children, including low-intensity exercise. Some argue that there are insufficient funds to allocate to PE making it impossible to support it. If schools can allocate some fund of the general day-to-day activities to the athletics portion, PE will be more accessible to all students and thus, preserve health. Please, not another child death, especially from obesity.

Sources:

Conor, Aaron. (2009, April 6). Should physical education be mandatory. Retrieved November 9, 2011, fromhttp://www.helium.com/items/688884-should-physical-education-be-mandatory

Hurley, Ryan. (2004, June 1). Physical Education, Extracurricular Sports Suffer Under Budget Strains. Retrieved November 13, 2011 from http://www.weac.org/news_and_publications/education_news/2003-2004/phyed.aspx

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2011, Oct 17). Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity. Retrieved November 13, 2011, from http://www.cdc.gov/Features/ObesityAndKids/

Eissler, Rob. (2011, May 23). State Rep. Rob Eissler says 34 children die from obesity every hour. Retrieved November 13, 2011, from http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2011/may/31/rob-eissler/state-rep-rob-eissler-says-34-children-die-obesity/

NutriStrategy. (2010). Health benefits of Exercise. Retrieved November 13, 2011, from http://www.nutristrategy.com/health.htm

Adams12 Five Star Schools. (2010-2011). Current Budget Pie Chart. Retrieved November 13, 2011, from http://www.adams12.org/files/finance/Understanding_the_08-09_Budget.pdf

Watson, Julia. (unknown). Obesity’s Officially Genetic! Retrieved November 13, 2011, from http://www.viewzone.com/obesity.html

Rooyan, KV. (2011, November 16). Boy, 9, dies of heart attack in front of classmates. Retrieved November 22, 2011, from http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/2011/11/16/boy-9-dies-of-heart-attack-in-front-of-classmates

Stern, Martin. (2000, February 10). Exercise-induced asthma. Retrieved November 16, 2011, from http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~aair/asthma_exer.htm

Thompson, JL, Manore, MM, Vaughan, L A. The Science of Nutrition. 2^nd ed. California: Pearson Education, Inc., 2011. Print.