Can’t we do better than 5.6 percent? Where’s the outrage over
5.6 percent? That’s the abysmally low percentage of Gilroy Unified
School District fifth-grade students who were able to pass the
California Physical Fitness Test, administered last spring.
Can’t we do better than 5.6 percent? Where’s the outrage over 5.6 percent? That’s the abysmally low percentage of Gilroy Unified School District fifth-grade students who were able to pass the California Physical Fitness Test, administered last spring.
And that number has been on a downward slide since 1999, when 17.4 percent of Gilroy’s fifth-graders were able to pass the state test. Statewide, 23 percent of California fifth-graders pass the state’s fitness test, which measures aerobic capacity, body composition, abdominal strength, trunk extension, upper-body strength and flexibility.
Of course, we shouldn’t be surprised at those numbers, because Gilroy’s elementary school students only receive a third of the state’s mandated minimum of 100 minutes of PE training each week.
If we look at seventh- and ninth-graders, the numbers are a little better – and they should be, since those kids have PE class every day – but still unacceptably low, at 18.6 percent and 13.5 percent, respectively.
We’re alarmed at the lack of outrage, or even concern, from GUSD administrators and trustees about these distressing test results.
The GUSD has set a lofty goal for itself – that 90 percent of students will perform at or above grade level by 2004. That needs to include PE, not just English, science, history and math.
But despite these shockingly low numbers, we only hear concern from the usual source: GUSD phys ed teacher Pat Vickroy.
“If you look at the scores overall and what they represent, then it’s a bleak picture,” Vickroy said.
It’s bleak because fitness is tied to better health throughout life, and it’s well known that the fitness habit must be established early.
Further, fitness is tied to better academic performance, in much the same way students who take music frequently do better in math.
Some say that parents should be solely responsible for their children’s physical activity levels – and in a perfect world, that would be true.
But just like we provide public education because we know many parents wouldn’t otherwise be able to provide sufficient mathematics, foreign language or social studies educations for their children, we must do the same for physical fitness.
As a society, we’ve decided that education is so important that we provide it for free, and to be complete, that education needs to include a successful PE curriculum.
Failure to educate our children about the importance of physical fitness handicaps them just as much as failure to teach them how to read, write and solve math problems.
The difference is that failure on this front condemns many of our children to lives riddled with chronic illness and early deaths from preventable diseases.
It’s critical that as a community, we make it a priority to make GUSD students’ physical fitness as high a priority as their academic fitness.
We urge Superintendent Edwin Diaz, a former coach himself, to show leadership on this issue.
Let’s find out how schools with high levels of physical fitness achieve it, then work to implement those ideas throughout GUSD. If it means extending the school day, if it means rearranging electives at the elementary level, if it means holding physical fitness weeks to model and promote healthy lifestyles (similar to the district’s literacy weeks), if it means reworking the PE curriculum at any or all grade levels, let’s implement it.
Clearly, whatever we’re doing now isn’t working. We owe our children more than well-trained minds in couch-potato bodies. As a community of administrators, educators, parents, athletes and students, let’s work together to lead Gilroy’s youth to futures with sound minds and bodies.
