Advertisement The district’s efforts to help kids get active and make healthy food choices seems to have been very successful this year, according to Fran Finco, the district’s instructional services director.
Finco credits much of the success to the financial support of the Minds In Motion bike tour, which targets its fundraising proceeds to the Fit Kids program.
The Fit Kids Living Healthy program started this school year and Finco said the program will continue and grow next year. This year, only kindergarten and third grades were involved. Next year, the program will expand to kindergarten, first-, third- and fourth-grades.
“The goal is to get kids fit and living healthy,” Finco said. “Obesity is rampant, so we need to do something as a district to help make our wellness policy mean something to the kids. That’s why we started with kindergarten kids — to change behavior at the lowest age level and build on the program each year to reinforce the learning.”
While a district wellness policy was implemented a few years ago, Finco said it was geared toward what teachers and staff should be doing, but there was nothing that got kids involved. That’s why the Fit Kids program was started last summer.
Another program, not connected with the Fit Kids program, but helping encourage physical activity, is the new Walking School Bus and the Morning Mile programs. The city of Onalaska and the La Crosse County Health Department launched these programs at Irving Pertzsch Elementary in Onalaska.
Every Wednesday morning between April 23 and May 28, children stand at a stop along a designated route, as if for a school bus. Instead of a bus coming to the stop, one or more adults walks to the stop, with kids picked up from prior stops and “picks up” the students and walks with them to school.
Once they get to school, the kids’ names are entered for a prize drawing, and they participate in the Morning Mile at the school by walking around a track at least four laps while carrying signs saying walking is fun.
Ginny Loehr, Safe Routes to School coordinator for La Crosse County, said even though participation in the Walking School Bus is still low, about 110 to 120 kids participate in the Morning Mile program.
“We want to make kids aware of the routes that are there for walking,” she said. “This year we’re trying to get the word out and have families know where the routes are. There is adult supervision.”
She said there are two goals of the program, safety and physical activity. Kids who actually live within walking distance are being transported to school by their parents. “It’s a safety issue,” Loehr said. “There’s stranger danger, and then there is traffic and crossing Main Street as a big issue, even though there are crossing guards.”
With adult supervision and teachers beginning to join the walking bus tours, Loehr hopes more students will walk to keep active.
Teachers, staff and community members have been a big part of the Fit Kids program, according to Finco. The Movin’ and Munchin’ program consisted of collecting mileage for each nutritional or physical activity recorded. Activities done with family members garnered more miles.
Students entered their miles into an online log on the district’s Web site and a program tracked their progress as if the student was traveling to Disney World in Florida. As students “crossed” state lines, the computer would tell them different things about the state they had entered.
Another Fit Kids program was Tasty Tuesdays — a big hit with the kids, spearheaded by Dr. Renata Anderson. Once each month the students tasted foods of a certain color. For one month, for example, it was a green month and the kids tasted kiwis and guacamole. May is berry and beans month.
In addition to tasting the foods, the school would send information home to the parents about what the kids tasted in school that day.
Third graders attended a health expo at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Six programs were designed to teach different things like reading labels, physical activity and nutritional information.
The day after the health expo, a parent called Finco saying it had made an impact with her child. The mother said she was giving her son Pop Tarts for breakfast. Finco said the boy read the label and said “Mom, this isn’t a healthy breakfast.”
This year, the Minds In Motion event began donating funds and volunteers for many of the Fit Kids initiatives. Minds in Motion is planning its fourth annual bike ride June 14. Finco said he had no idea how much it costs to run the program because so much of it’s donated, such as the food for Tasty Tuesdays.
“Without Minds in Motion, we can’t fund something like this,” Finco said. “This year we ran on a shoestring budget.”
The last activity for the Fit Kids program this year will be a fun run/walk on May 21. All the schools, except Northern Hills, will take off at the same time, 8:30 a.m., and parents and teachers can take part.
Next year, in addition to extending the program to more grade levels, Finco said they want to have a Safety on Wheels program that discusses safety on rollerblades, skateboards, bicycles and whatever has wheels.
“We want to cap it off with a bike rodeo,” Finco said. “The bike rodeo would have the kids take their bikes through an obstacle course. That plan (nor its funding) hasn’t been developed yet.”
Contact Jo Anne Killeen at joanne.killeen@lee.net or (608) 786-6816.
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