Nurse’s Notes

Using the “Reports” portion of the district’s health records software, I have extracted data from last year’s height and weight screenings for all Paris ISD students screened in Kindergarten through fifth grade. The total number of students screened was 1239. The data included, among other things, height, weight, date of birth, grade, and BMI percentile. Using the Center for Disease Control’s guidelines, the BMI’s were filtered to determine the number of students in each grade level that fell into the CDC categories of either “At Risk for Overweight” or “Overweight”. The results, shown in Table 1, are all students with BMI’s over the “Healthy Weight” category which is all students with BMI’s above the 85th percentile.Table 1For comparison purposes however, most literature that references statistics on overweight children is looking at percentages of children with a BMI in the 95th percentile and above. Table 2 shows the percentage per grade level of PISD students in K-5 that are considered overweight.Table 2As you can see, the percentage overweight students increases in each grade screened from K through five. This trend parallels the results found in CDC studies shown at this link in Table 7.In PISD, the average percentage of overweight students in grades K-5 combined is 23.16%. CDC studies grouped children into age ranges. The approximate corresponding range for K-5 in the CDC studies would be “Ages 6-11″. The following table shows CDC study results for overweight trends among the 6-11 age group from 1963 to 2004. (Click chart to enlarge)If the PISD Kindergarten data was dropped and the percentages from the remaining grades averaged to better match the CDC’s Age 6-11 range, the average percentage of overweight students would increase to 24.87 %.Given the most recent data available from the CDC is from 2004 and assuming the number of overweight children has continued to increase, the 18.8% from the 2003-2004 results would be lower than expected had there been data available from 2006. Even taking this into consideration, it appears that at 24.87%, the number of PISD students that fall in the “Overweight” category according to CDC guidelines is greater than the national average.It will be interesting to see how these results will correlate to the fitness screenings that will be started this year. I believe there will be a great interest in the media as the fitness screening results across Texas are turned into TEA and become public. I hope it will open a dialog with parents and perhaps encourage healthy lifestyle changes at home.<script src=”http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js” type=”text/javascript”> </script> <script type=”text/javascript”> _uacct = “UA-3987272-1″; urchinTracker(); </script> 

In the interest of time, and since I have not undertaken the project I first wrote about this summer, I’m moving onto plan B. Like a lot of my projects, the planning stage and initiation stage have yet to meet. In addition, since I sleep with the teacher, I feel like I needed to post a blog entry before I’m kicked out of the class and turmoil ensues at home. First let me say, I haven’t completely given up on the idea of creating a student group presentation and still will hopefully some time this school year. I have spent some time looking at some of the online digital story-telling sites; my favorite is as far as aesthetics goes is http://voicethread.com/. I haven’t actually played with uploading and using it, but I think it would be straightforward. However, I may just stick with Photo Story. I’ve only worked with it a little but found it extremely easy to use. I like the feeling of ownership of the finished file, and I like the fact I can upload it to this blog, Teacher Tube, or make it into a podcast. That’s all thoughts about Plan A though, so let me get onto Plan B. Since finding time to coordinate getting out of my clinic and into the classroom has been a challenge, I am going to collect and share some statistics available from within the nurse’s office and student health records program.

During the 80^th legislative session this past summer,
Texas passed Senate Bill 530 that requires a physical fitness assessment of all students in grades 3-12 starting this school year. The assessment results are to be turned into the state. The state, in turn, will evaluate if there is an apparent correlation between fitness and other areas such as student achievement, attendance, and disciplinary problems. Part of the fitness assessment is determining the student’s BMI or body mass index, a general indication of the amount of body fat an individual has. BMI is determined from height and weight measurements so I am going to run a report of the BMI’s obtained last school year during height and weight screenings and to see what percentage of students would be considered overweight according to the CDC’s guidelines. (The state mandated fitness assessment has many more segments other than BMI determination and certainly will give a more complex picture of student fitness.)

I am using last year’s data because the collection process goes on throughout the school year and is not complete for this school year. According to the CDC, the prevalence of obesity for those aged 6–11 years has increased from 6.5% to 18.8% since the mid seventies. I’m not used to thinking in terms of BMI and will be interested in seeing how many students are identified as overweight using BMI as a screening tool. My general feeling is that the numbers will not be encouraging. It will aslo be interesting to see the results of the state-mandated fitness assessments and what is printed in the media about the results and student test scores.