By Jim McLean
KHI News Service
TOPEKA, Feb.
6
The sponsor of Kansas legislation to address childhood obesity said she doesn”t think that controversy surrounding an Arkansas obesity program will negatively affect her bill.
The Arkansas House voted last week to eliminate a requirement that school districts conduct body-mass measurements on students. Opponents objected to the program”s cost and a requirement that BMI report cards be sent to parents.
But Rep. Pat Colloton, R-Leawood, the sponsor of a proposal requiring Kansas public schools to administer fitness tests, said her bill only requires schools to pass the assessment results along to the State Department of Education and Kansas Department of Health and Environment. The
body mass index
calculations would be done by KDHE, not school personnel. In addition, Colloton said, individual students wouldn”t be identified and no BMI report cards would be issued to parents.
“We didn”t need to do that to meet our objective,” Colloton said, explaining that the Kansas data would be used to develop physical education standards for schools.
Colloton said gathering BMI data is a practical first step in assessing the extent of the childhood obesity problem in Kansas.
“We already have plenty of nationwide data, but we don”t have it for Kansas,” she said.
The House Education Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on Colloton”s bill, HB 2090, on Tuesday, Feb. 13.
Supporters of Arkansas” BMI program say it is responsible for halting what had been a steady increase in the state”s childhood obesity rate.
Three years into the program, state officials reported the percentage of students classified as overweight had dropped from 20.9 percent to 20.4 percent and that the percentage classified as “at risk for overweight” had dropped from 17.2 percent to 17.1 percent.
But Republican Rep. Keven Anderson, the sponsor of the bill to eliminate the BMI measurement, said the testing had “little or nothing to do with the small or incremental improvement” in the childhood obesity rate. And he said the testing requirement had been a drain on school resources.
“We”re not providing a great deal of revelation to parents when we send this report home,” Anderson told the Associated Press.
Supporters of the testing, including Democratic Rep. Betty Pickett, warned that doing away with it would be a costly mistake.
“The real drain on Arkansas” resources will be the money the state spends in the future to treat the diseases of obesity,” Pickett said in an Associated Press article published in the Log Cabin Democrat, an Arkansas newspaper.
In Kansas, direct medical costs related to obesity are estimated to be more than $650 million a year.
Jim McLean is a staff writer for KHI News Service, which specializes in coverage of health issues facing Kansans. He can be reached at
jmclean@khi.org
or at 785-233-5443, ext. 110.