Palm Beach school board pushes for improved P.E. efforts

A few weeks ago I wrote about some of the questionable methods South Florida’s schools were using to meet a state physical education mandate. The law says students must get 30 minutes of P.E. a day, but schools said they didn’t have enough time or P.E. teachers, so they counted recess as P.E. or played fitness videos in class. And some educators acknowledged they weren’t meeting the mandate at all.

It turns out some Palm Beach County School Board members aren’t so happy with the P.E. efforts at its school and believe it should be a bigger priority, the Palm Beach Post reports.

“It seems that the message from the Legislature, in part, and even from the administration in the past, is that the most important thing is the testing results,” school board member Jenny Prior Brown said during a workshop Wednesday that focused on P.E.

She noted that “awards and punishments” for schools are given out based on FCAT scores, not on how many students are running or playing ball, the Post reported.

“That’s not serving the whole child,” Brown said. “What you’re hearing from this board is we believe in physical activity for children. … This is a priority.”

In Broward County, Schoool Board member Laurie Rich Levinson has been a vocal critic of the district’s P.E. efforts and has brought the issue up at several meetings. The county has eliminated numerous P.E. teachers due to budget cuts, and 31 schools don’t even have one.

Let’s hope they can find a way to make P.E. a top priority. As we all know, the childhood obesity epidemic is only getting worse.

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