Last week, the state Board of Education issued some recommendations to local school authorities around the state, in order to safeguard our children’s health.
At issue is the weight of textbooks. Children carrying them home to do homework often must carry every book they use in school to and from their house.
Taken together, the kid’s backpacks can weigh thirty percent or more of the children’s own weight.
You may think, “What the heck, they’re kids. A little lifting isn’t that bad for them.” And a perusal of recent studies showing an alarming rise in child obesity and related health problems such as heart disease and juvenile diabetes might lead you to believe that such strenuous activity is actually good for the children.
Doctors and pediatricians are already offering cautions and guidelines to parents on how much and how often kids should lift and carry such weights.
You and I might carry a twenty-pound sack of books and barely notice it. Your sixty-pound daughter is going to feel differently, though. The heaviest textbooks being used in Sevier County weigh around 15 pounds. Each.
The Board of Education didn’t go very far towards offering local school boards a solution.
One suggestion the board offered is that teachers send children home with less homework. “Less” homework won’t mean much to the student; if the book is required to do the homework, then it must be carried home, regardless of whether the assignment is to read one hundred pages, or one.
In many classes in public school, the vast majority of the work is done outside of the classroom. This is not a poor reflection on schools or teachers: it is an inevitable consequence of the limited time during which students are physically in class.
Students would be assigned homework in only one or two classes each day, and be asked to do more in those one or two subjects. The next day, the homework would fall under a different subject, and again trade off breadth for depth.
Another suggestion offered by the Board would be to purchase one additional textbook per subject per student, and allow the students to keep one book at home.
The vast majority of schools will be unable to afford this solution.
Sevier County replaces the textbooks for one subject each year, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. This year’s budget has almost $300,000 earmarked to replace textbooks for language arts and growth. With the school budget already $4.6 million-plus outside of funding, imagine having to double this spending every year.
Lastly, the Board recommended that, where possible, schools rely on “online” texts. Again, this is a partial solution at best. Even if we assumed that every child had a computer at home (which they don’t), and that all of those children with computers had online access (which they don’t), and that all of them that were able to connect could get access to the texts (which they can’t), then all we would need would be for every textbook to be available online.
Which it isn’t. In fact, most of them aren’t available electronically in any form.
Even if The Computer Fairy were to put a shiny new laptop on every student’s desk, it still wouldn’t solve the problem, because the books they need in many cases just aren’t available.
So, in a year or so, I expect the State Board of Education to offer an alternative solution to the growing weight of textbooks.
Starting giving the kids steroids.

… read the rest of the story by Subscribing now.

... read the rest of the story by Subscribing now.