Imagine this: 14-year old Joe walks down Canal Street. A turbulent New York City school day is behind him, an open and bustling McDonald’s is in front of him. He brushes the door open with his elbow and waits in line before ordering his favorite: a quarter-pounder meal and a Coke. He walks his overly-full tray to the lonely corner of the restaurant and savors the warm sandwich and sweet drink. But at the same time, he feels an overwhelming pang of sadness.
Like 4.8 million children in the United States, Joe is obese. His doctor makes him well aware of this at each of his check-ups, and the kids at school make him aware of this on a daily basis. Joe’s parents struggle to fix their son’s eating behavior, especially since they have both been overweight since high school. His overworked and exhausted counselors at his underfunded school have not even had a chance to speak with him about his health.
And yet, Joe’s weight has become an enigma for him. Sure, he’s eating fast food weekly, sometimes daily, but he doesn’t have a choice. His parents and his older brother are working 10 hours a day: they don’t have time to prepare his meals. Joe thinks that McDonald’s should not even be a bad choice, given the skinny, vibrant kids munching on burgers in their commercials. If the school lunch program or the fast food restaurants he visited were truly deceitful, the government would have stepped in. Right?
Somewhere along the way, Joe and his family gave their trust to a person or entity that did not deserve it. We have to trace his steps to find out who.
Joe began his day in his bed. He brushed his teeth, threw on a shirt, some jeans, a New York Mets baseball cap, and his shoes. His mother’s call beckoned him to the kitchen, where we will make our first examination. Only 34% of Americans eat breakfast everyday, most citing sleep deprivation, a rush to get to work, and a lack of morning appetite. It has been found that nearly all pre-school age children and younger eat breakfast daily, but as children grow older, they become last likely to eat in the morning.
Breakfast sets up the body’s metabolic clock for the day, and determines how well the body can respond to external stimuli throughout the day. Thus, somewhat counter-intuitively, skipping breakfast is correlated with obesity. Joe doesn’t skip breakfast everyday, but he misses it enough for there to be a problem. When his parents go to work late, they prepare breakfast for him and make sure he eats it. But more often than not, his family is out of the house before Joe is awake, and the 12-year old is more likely to hit snooze than make his own meal and eat it.
Fortunately, over 90,000 schools in the country serve breakfast, and an estimated 770,000 free breakfasts are distributed to students every year. This means that many students, like Joe, can get breakfast at a cheap price when they arrive to school, and more importantly, don’t have to view breakfast as yet another stress.
Stress is a significant part of Joe’s—and most American’s—day. Upon arriving to school, he is expected to absorb facts and formulas, recall prior knowledge for assessments, and race to each class in time, all while explaining his faltering grades to his teachers and his “dorkiness” to the bullies.
Joe has a tough life, but he’s not alone.
49% of high school students report feeling stressed on a daily basis. The study measured chronic stress (“on a daily basis”), the most detrimental form of stress a child can experience. Periods of chronic stress lead to redistribution of energy stores.
We must ask then, who are we putting in charge of Joe’s stress? You might say the high school counselors and psychologists, but counselors are being overworked across the country. Even though counselors and teachers are the strings holding students to our often-struggling education system, they do not have the time to truly help students make the right decisions.
The average counselor in the US takes on 482 students at the same time. As for school psychologists, they are a rare privilege to the schools that have them, and they usually rotate among multiple schools in a cluster, rendering the average psychologist responsible for a caseload of multiple thousand students.
How do schools manage their students’ public health with limited faculty? Recently, many school districts have adopted some health initiatives, but the problems with these initiatives are two-fold. First, they adopt a one-size-fits-all mindset that doesn’t reach students with genuine problems. Second, and more importantly, their vague and verbose mission statements give a false impression that they are solving problems that cannot be totally solved. Let’s look at Be Well 365, an initiative launched by Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland.
“Be Well 365 will ensure that students have the necessary skills to:
- Become positive members of the school and broader community
- Manage their emotions
- Build academic and social resilience
- Identify and access support for themselves or a friend
- Peacefully resolve conflict, and
- Make positive decisions”
The word “ensure” is the first red flag. In a county of one million people, how exactly will this initiative ensure anything? The second through sixth red flags are each of the bullet points, because they refer to broad ideals that cannot be met regularly. While “making positive decisions” is always good, stronger initiatives are necessary.
Joe occasionally sees the bright and wordy posters hanging around the building, but he has no clue what the initiatives are and what they mean. All he knows is his daily routine: go to seven classes, talk to seven different teachers, and make his way through a city that feels like 8 million footsteps everyday.
Joe is left to make his own decisions as a high school student, and these decisions will affect him for the rest of his life. There’s no after-school program to support him, as many have found their way out of low-income neighborhoods. There’s no counselor whom he can see on a regular basis, and his teachers are far too swamped in lesson plans and grading to be able to talk to him everyday. Our education system lacks a personalized approach to Joe’s problems, mainly because all the money that could be spent guiding teachers and counselors through their education is being invested in short-lived initiatives and cookie-cutter policies.
Eighty percent of obese adolescents go on to become obese adults, so it’s unlikely that adulthood will pull these children out of their problems. Today’s students is being overwhelmed by the education system that’s supposed to care for them, and it’s making it easier for obesity to reach them.
Article by Shariar Vaez-Ghaemi of Montgomery Blair High School
Graphic by Angelina Guhl of Richard Montgomery High School