Background and Purpose
The Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act of 2004 required school districts that participate in federal Child Nutrition Programs, including the National School Lunch and Breakfast programs, to establish a local wellness policy (LSWP) to address childhood obesity by the start of the 2006-07 school year. Among other things, the wellness policies were required to include goals for physical activity (PA) designed to promote student wellness in a manner that the local education agency (LEA) determined appropriate. While physical education (PE) may be included in the definition of PA, LEAs were not required to include specific goals to address PE but most districts do have PE policies in addition to or incorporated into their wellness policies.
Objectives
This presentation will highlight characteristics of districts with various types of PE and PA policies from a nationally representative sample of U.S. public school districts for the years 2006-07 through 2010-11.
Methods
District policies were compiled as part of the annual, nationwide evaluation of written wellness policies conducted by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-supported Bridging the Gap Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Between school years 2006 through 2010, over 2000 policies have been collected and analyzed using an adaptation of a wellness policy coding scheme developed by Schwartz et al. (2009) and originally presented in Chriqui et al. (2010). Policies were analyzed to assess strength and comprehensiveness of selected PE and PA variables.Descriptive statistics were computed, clustered to account for the sample design, and weighted to account for districts nationwide. Multivariate logistic regression models examined the factors influencing district adoption of strong/required policies, including whether the state had a similar law on the given PE/PA topic, district racial/ethnic composition, region, locale, free-reduced lunch participation (FRL)/socioeconomic status (SES), and school year.
Results
Results will show the percent of districts nationwide with required provisions for PE and PA during the 2010-11 school year. The presentation will present trends over time. Districts in states with strong laws are more likely to require a PE curriculum across all grades K-12 (OR = 1.90, 95% CI = 1.25, 2.86, p<.002). Furthermore, being in the West, Midwest, or Northeast as compared to the South, being in the suburbs as compared to the city, and low-to-mid FRL participation (low/mid SES) are significantly associated with districts requiring a PE curriculum across all grades. Districts with majority Hispanic students are less likely to have a PE curriculum at each grade compared to majority white. Policies are more likely to be applicable at the elementary and middle school levels as compared to the high school level. Similar trends were found for promotion of a physically active lifestyle, competency assessment of knowledge/skills/practice, and credentialing/licensing and training of PE teachers.At the elementary school level, a district requirement for a specific number of PE minutes per week was significantly predicted by the following: strong state laws (OR = 5.24, 95% CI = 2.14, 12.78, p<.000), being in the West, Midwest, and Northeast as compared to the South, and being in the suburbs as compared to the city; however, this trend was not found at the middle or high school levels.Conversely, districts within the West, Midwest, or Northeast regions as compared to the South were less likely to require physical activity during the school day (outside PE) for each grade level. State law did not significantly predict the likelihood of districts requiring physical activity across grade levels. District PA policies were twice as likely (OR = 2.1, 95% CI = 1.39, 3.17, p<.000) to require PA across all grade levels, integrate PA into the core curriculum (OR = 2.2, 95% CI = 1.30, 3.81, p<.004), and promote community use of school facilities outside the school day (OR = 1.7, 95% CI = 1.10, 2.74, p<.018) during the 2010-11SY as compared to 2006-07SY.
Conclusions
The National Association for Sport and Physical Education recommend that children be engaged in at least 60 minutes of age-appropriate physical activity on all or most days of the week. Despite the importance of PA in promoting an active lifestyle and its potential to prevent childhood obesity, the majority of district policies fall short in terms of providing adequate opportunities for PE and PA at school.
