FROM ACCESS PAGE 1 Gaining entrance to grounds aids kid fitness
JAMS Brandon McDonough is a sports fanatic. When he’s not playing golf at the Riviera County Club with his grandparents, the 7-year-old student at Franklin Elementary is out with his father Ashley playing soccer or football.
On a recent Saturday afternoon, McDonough and his father were at John Adams Middle School practicing tennis despite the cloudy skies.
“We try to get out as often as we can,”Ashley McDonough said as his son chased tennis balls that had rolled passed him during a previous rally. “The schools are good places to play because there usually aren’t as many people using the courts or the fields as in the parks. There it can get pretty crowded.”
Like many families in Santa Monica, the McDonough’s find the playgrounds and other amenities at school sites to be very accessible, which, according to a recent RAND study, is a good thing for schools not only keep children engaged mentally, but physically as well, helping them stay fit and trim.
It seems the more accessible a school site is, the healthier children living nearby seem to be.
The study, which visited school sites in six major cities, found that playgrounds and athletic facilities can be important tools in the fight against childhood obesity, but many are locked and inaccessible to children on weekends, especially in poor and minority neighborhoods.
Researchers focused on sixth-grade girls in Washington,D.C., Baltimore, Columbia, S.C., Minneapolis, New Orleans, Tucson, and San Diego.Researchers visited all the schools and parks within a half-mile radius of the homes of the girls on Saturdays in the spring of 2003. The 407 schools surveyed represented 44 percent of potential neighborhood sites for physical activity.
Researchers found that, on average, 66 percent of the schools were unlocked on weekends. But only 57 percent of schools were both unlocked and had accessible facilities for weekend physical activities such as playgrounds, athletic fields, basketball courts and paved playing surfaces.
The percentage of schools that kids could access varied across communities, with New Orleans (pre-Hurricane Katrina) at the bottom with 23 percent and Minneapolis at the top with 93 percent.
“Girls who lived near locked schools tended to be heavier, and neighborhoods with locked schools were disproportionately poor and had larger minority populations,” said Molly Scott, lead author of the study and research analyst with RAND, a nonprofit research organization based in Santa Monica.
“These neighborhoods, where risk of obesity is high and public parks and playgrounds are often lacking, could benefit from convenient and safe places for physical activity. And making schools accessible doesn’t require construction. It’s a policy change.”
City and school officials here have made that change. Under Playground Partnerships, a facilities use agreement between the school district and City Hall, as well as the CREST after-school program, elementary and secondary schools across the city are open after school and on weekends, providing a safe and secure place to play.
The Playground Partnership program is available to youth 18 years old and younger and friends and family who are with them. Others are encouraged to use one of the city’s parks. CREST, which stands for Child Care- Recreation-Enrichment-Sports-Together is for grades K-8.
“This is a model for school district and city partnerships around the nation,” said Michael Hill, the recreation facilities coordi-nator for the school district. “You can’t ask for a more cooperative agreement between school sites, user groups, the city and the school district.”
Hill said that at issue is the lack of open space for adults. Fields are heavily used by youth sports groups, leaving adults scrambling for soccer fields and tennis courts. Hill would like to see relatively vacant stretches of beach greened so that people could play soccer or football year round.
City Hall, this past weekend, held the grand opening of the 8.3-acre Airport Park, which includes the city’s first synthetic turf athletic field that can withstand far more wear and tear than a normal, grass field. The ability to play at nights and during the off-season has prompted City Hall to create an adult soccer league. The pilot program is for adults of all skill levels.
The partnerships are paying off,according to physical fitness figures released by the district.
In a physical fitness test given to all fifth,seventh and ninth graders in the state, 75 percent of students in Santa Monica-Malibu schools achieved either four, five, or six of the standards,which is higher than the average.The test includes various tasks that look at one’s aerobic capacity, body composition, abdominal strength, dexterity, and upper body strength.
“This is really good news for our kids,”said Amy Teplin, coordinator of teacher support and professional development for the school district.
Although the RAND health study didn’t find a relationship between school accessibility and increased weekend physical activity rates, the number of locked schools was associated with a significantly higher body mass index for the girls tracked. Body mass index, or BMI, is a mathematical formula representing weight relative to height that can be used to determine whether a person is overweight or underweight.
The study found differences in BMI and physical activity by the girls’ race and socioeconomic status, consistent with the findings of previous studies. Hispanic and African- American girls had 7.2 percent and 7.8 percent higher BMIs respectively than whites, and non-white girls recorded less physical activity than their white counterparts.
“Studies consistently find that people of different races have different BMIs, but the policy implications of that are often unclear,” Scott said. “This study identifies locked schools as great points of policy intervention where gains in the fight against obesity could potentially be made.”
More research is needed, Scott said, noting that the study did not measure whether the girls in the study actually used the school facilities for exercise. The fact that girls with higher BMIs tended to live in areas with locked schools also could signal that the girls live in a more stressful, high-crime area or a neighborhood with less access to stores that sell healthy food.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 1, 2007. Read the original PDF.