Not Your Father's Gym Class

In the German language, there is a good-natured, single-word insult: turnbeutelvergesser. It translates to “gym bag forgetter.” It is one of several slights that could drag up bad memories of junior high school gym classes that were for many awkward teens a chamber of emotional horrors.

If Lori Rose Benson worked in Washington, she might be called The Gym Czar. But Benson works for the NYC Department of Education, where she carries the title of Director of Fitness and Physical Education. In the past few years, she has revamped courses, emphasized changing the phys ed teaching culture and joined the national push to tackle the problem of childhood obesity. She is a product of NYC public schools and has few—if any—fond memories of gym class during her elementary school days in Brooklyn.

In looking back, Benson points out that from the mid-1970s until 2003, New York City not only forgot its collective gym bag but also ignored the importance of physical education in general.

Benson, who holds a B.A. from U. Mass-Amherst and a master’s in physical education from Adelphi University, is now fighting the health and fitness battle armed with some 3,000 phys ed teachers among 1.1 million students. And, as she told New York Family Sports, she is broadening the fitness mission from the gymnasium into the classroom.

What are some of the goals for physical education in 2009?

The overall goal of the office of Fitness and Health Education is to increase the quality and quantity of health and physical education programs. It’s about continuing our roll-out of core fitness education curricula, a city-wide fitness assessment, the expansion of our middle school sports and fitness program, continued support for adaptive physical education citywide and really supporting physical education teachers in schools through year-round professional development so they can develop and hone their skills to support their students.

Do you see your department as well equipped to achieve these goals, or are there some challenges ahead?

I think it is important to put this all into perspective. If you would understand the history of physical education here in New York City, you’d see after the 1975 fiscal crisis, physical education truly never recovered until just about six years ago. The last three decades had small initiatives that did not have any legs when it came to systemic growth and capacity for physical education. Then in 2003, an interesting study took place and the Department of Health along with the Department of Education looked at childhood obesity. We found that 43 percent of our elementary school students were either overweight or obese. In that same study, one out of five kindergarten students coming into our system were already clinically obese. As a result of those dire statistics, my office was created. We started out as an office of one five and half years ago, and now we’ve grown to an office of nearly 30 fulltime folks who work to support all of our schools in fitness and health education.

Why did it take so long for the city to come around? was phys ed stuck on the back burner?

I think it had not been a priority for previous administrations.

I think physical education was not the only area left on the side – the arts were in that same boat. Though physical education has always been a core instructional component, the fact that childhood obesity is a critical public health issue has really shed some light on this and brought it back to the forefront.

Could you talk a little about fitnessgrams? how do they go over with the students and parents?

The New York City FitnessGram is actually a fitness assessment report looking at areas of a student’s health-related fitness. It looks at aerobic fitness, muscle strain, endurance, flexibility and also body mass index. We’ve had really encouraging support from students who are excited to have this information and learn how to set personal goals – because really what this is all about is empowering students to take responsibility for their own personal fitness. They are with us for a big chunk of their time during the school day, but a lot of their decisions about their health happen outside of the school day when they are home or walking by a fast-food restaurant. We really need to empower them to understand the balance of calories in and calories out and that they can take some responsibility and understand how to set their own personal goals now and ultimately for a lifetime. We’ve had encouraging comments from parents. We’ve not had push-back as we’ve rolled this out. The important thing to understand about the FitnessGram is that it is not a graded assessment, it is not factored into a student’s grade or shared with other students or posted on the wall. It is an individual progress report.

As a product of new york city public schools, how much have things changed, and what do you remember about gym class back then?

Unfortunately, I did not have very positive experiences with physical education until I was in high school. When I was younger I loved to dance, I loved to swim and play tennis, but those were not options in the elementary school I went to. They had a lot of traditional sports, a lot of team sports. I remember being that kid in right field just hoping the ball wouldn’t come toward me. I was chubby and there wasn’t really a means for teaching me through physical education about my body and about the choices I could make or the way I could exercise and keep myself fit. It wasn’t until I went to high school—Midwood High School—that they had created a little fitness and weight room. It was really interesting and I really got excited about fitness and saw big changes and realized I could take control over this. Now we have many schools with traditional gyms but also with fitness centers. We have many schools that offer unique fitness classes as electives like yoga and pilates and step aerobics and things like that. We’re seeing much more choice. On the other side, I’m not saying [traditional] sports are not important or sports don’t have a place, but it is important that when a sport is taught, it is taught at a developmental level and that includes a focus on fitness. We have definitely seen a shift in terms of focusing more on lifetime fitness and individual activities, which is great because these are skills that students can take beyond the classroom, and that’s really what it is all about.