These PAWs May Not Be Refreshed

Third-grader Talizha Jones does crunches and jumping jacks and her favorite, lunges, beside her desk at the Katherine Brennan School in West Rock.

She gets to do them because of a program that appears to be working — and now in financial trouble.

At the Board of Education (BOE)‘s bimonthly meeting Monday night, Jean Zdanys, the nurse practitioner at Talizha’s school, and other facilitators of the BOE​’s Physical Activity & Wellness (PAW) program said the three-year old effort at classroom-based physical fitness and general wellness promotion in the schools may be in jeopardy. The threat comes precisely at a time when it has proven it works.

The program, now operating in 18 K‑5 schools, began four years ago with what BOE officials described as an unfunded state mandate to provide a certain amount of physical activity for the system’s younger kids.

The BOE responded by developing a pioneering wellness program that integrates ​“Take Ten,” physical activity, such as jumping jacks, with academic subjects as part of general focus on healthy culture in the schools. When Talizha gets a letter right in a hangman spelling game, for example, she gets to do, say, ten lunges.

The program also includes creative activities involving the whole school, such as healthful snack-tasting contests, anti-bullying poster campaigns, a nutrition jingle contest, activities to promote hand washing among kids to prevent flu. These efforts involve parents and the whole school staff, organized around school-based wellness committees.

Each of the 18 current schools has a facilitator, such as Zdanys at Clarence Rogers and Katherine Brennan School, plus an overall coordinator. ​“The idea,” said Sue Peters, the coordinator, who runs the school-based health clinic at Vincent Mauro School, ​“is to change the culture of the school, to promote general good eating, health, and activity. And we think it’s really working.”

In a Power Point presentation to the board based on statistics from six of the 18 schools, Peters and an outside evaluation consultant, Sonia Pereira, an education professor at Barnard College, reported that more than 60 percent of participating teachers said the program improved their class climate. Teachers who implemented Take Ten more often and for longer periods had more of a ​“dramatic and sustained decrease in disruptive behaviors.”

Will Clark, the BOE​’s chief operating officer, pronounced PAW the best wellness program in the state bar none. The program, which has run on private grants secured by Peters and the system’s Wellness Committee co-chair, Sue Weisselberg (who’s also the school construction czar), has successfully attracted grants to provide the $18,000 to pay the staff stipends and a small pool of grants that go the schools to fund materials for projects.

Up to now, that is. ​“We were asked to apply for a number of these grants,” said Weisselberg, ​“because our involvement of our staff and what we’ve done is a statewide model.”

Now those grants, after three years, are running out. ​“The financial meltdown has affected us badly,” said Peters. Several local grant makers, she said, have told them that resources they expected to be able to deploy to PAW are now frozen. ​“We are hoping to hear from the Centers for Disease Control,” Peters said, ​“which funds seven of the 18 schools, and other things may come through. But we just don’t know.”

There was considerable buy-in, particularly by younger teachers who use the Take Ten or the ABC of Fitness, the physical activity component of PAWS, typically as tension-relieving activities with an academic component when kids transition from subject to subject.

Some parents and local experts have disputed the value of the Take Ten aspect of PAW as a poor substitute for genuine unstructured recess. Superintendent Reggie Mayo’s interest in expanding traditional recess has been hampered, according to Clark and Weisselberg, by the absence of funds for supervision.

Which has made PAW​’s and particularly Take Ten that much more important. The goal of the program had been in this second phase to expand from 18 to all the 28 K‑5 schools as well as to make the physical activity component as interesting to kids in the older grades as the younger. At this point, however, the very existence of the program appears in doubt.