Advocating for Our Profession:
Presenting to Your School Board (Part 2)
by Paul
Clinton, Past-President WAHPERD
Advocacy
is preventive medicine and in this second in a series of three
articles on advocating for your profession it's worth reviewing
the first of the three rules of advocacy that I laid out in
Part
1. The First rule of advocacy is Do Some - It Works.
For advocacy to truly be preventive
you must do some and one of the best places to advocate is
with your school board. School board meetings are public venues
where a wide range of decision makers and policy influencers
are present. It's a perfect setting in which to direct and
influence the discussion and understanding of health, physical
activity, and the role a quality physical education program
plays in the development of our children. When and what you
present to the School Board will be crucial in determining
how effective your advocacy is and whether it is truly preventive
medicine.
In my previous article, I pointed
out the parallels between martial arts and job protection
and made the case for an offensive-defense strategy. In martial
arts you want to make your opponent think twice before even
attempting to hit you. In physical education, offensive-defense
is what you do when times are good to ensure that your district
will not even consider attacking your program during tough
economic times. The time to advocate with your school board
is not when there is trouble but when things are going well
and you have a positive story to tell.
It is very hard to change harmful
decisions once they have been made and advocacy that starts
at this point amounts to shoring up the levy after the flood.
You may feel good about your valiant effort and the justice
of your fight but you will probably lose. So if you are comfortable
with the standing of your program in your district and you
do not fear program cuts, then now is a perfect time to apply
some preventive medicine and make a presentation to your school
board. If your program is threatened then you do not have
a moment to lose and you need to start the advocacy process
immediately.
Before you plan your school board
presentation you must ask yourself one vital question: Is
your program defensible?
Try answering the following questions
about your program:
- Do you keep longitudinal physical
activity/fitness data for all your students?
- Can you show a record of improvement
in these numbers?
- Can you tie your physical activity/fitness
data to academic performance?
- Do all of your students take any
state mandated physical education assessments?
- Can you show yearly improvement
in these scores?
- Can you document skill improvement
in your students?
- Do you have other data to show
what students are learning in your classes?
If you can answer "yes" to most of
these questions then you have a highly defensible program
and this can be the basis for a very positive presentation
to your school board. If your answer is "no" to most of these
questions, you risk standing before the board and having to
answer some very uncomfortable questions such as "Can you
prove your program is effective?" or "All of our other teachers
are expected to document student improvement, if you can't
do that, why keep you?"
We are going to work under the assumption
that you do have an outstanding program and a great story
to tell. In our offensive-defense strategy we not only want
to deliver a timely punch but a punch that carries some weight.
It is not enough to just lecture on the importance of what
you do. You need to show actual results for your program.
Objective data showing how your program is improving kids
physically and mentally is a punch that cannot be ignored.
It is one thing to tell someone that
childhood obesity is a national problem and exercise is part
of the solution. But it would have much more impact if you
could show actual statistics that there are fewer overweight
kids in your program this year than there were last year?
Your school board members may be mildly interested in national
statistics, but they will be deeply engrossed in data about
the children in their district and these kinds of stats make
a great starting point for your school board presentation.
I always start my school board presentations
with a review of the past year's fitness testing results.
This guarantees that I have the board members' and the audience's
full attention as there is nothing they are more interested
in than the children in their district. Often I will preface
it with a question such as "Can public education have an impact
on the health and fitness of students?" Following are some
of the ways I use our fitness results when presenting to the
school board.
- Compare fall and spring results to highlight improvements
and connect them to our PE program.
- Compare spring and fall results
to highlight the decrease in fitness that happens to students
over the summer when they are not in our PE program.
- Link fitness to academics by comparing
GPA and the number of fitness tests passed. Kids who pass
all fitness items on average rank at the top of GPA and
kids who pass few or no fitness items rank at the bottom
of GPA.
- I ask, "What is the likelihood
of a student having at least one "F" grade based
on their fitness test results?" At my school those
who pass all fitness tests are much less likely to have
an "F" in any class.
You can also use fitness stats to
highlight problems that the board and district administration
can help you solve as well as problems we are solving on our
own. Only half as many 6th graders can pass all five of our
fitness tests compared to 8th graders. Physical education
in our elementary schools is only once a week for 30 minutes
compared to the every other day for 50 minutes that we have
at the middle school. We are constantly playing catch up with
our 6th graders and this makes a good case for the district
to increase elementary physical education time.
We also show the school board the
number of kids you are physically at risk and how these numbers
decrease over the course of the school year. This provides
a perfect opportunity to introduce them to the programs we
have developed to target these at-risk kids such as:
- Adopt a pedometer.
- Caught in the act eating a healthy
lunch.
- Cougar fitness awards.
- Fitness contests with other middle
schools.
While statistics and what they mean
and how they drive our program make up the bulk of what needs
to be a fairly brief presentation, a school board meeting
is also a good time for some general education and putting
a human face on your program. A few years ago, for dramatic
impact I quickly showed the CDC obesity map slides from 1985
to 2010. While most physical educators are familiar with this
information it was new material for most of the board and
audience. We also take a year-end survey of what students'
value in our PE program and show the board the top five.
The board was impressed that fitness
testing always makes the top 5 as well as some other non-traditional
activities such as social dance and self-defense. We also
put a human face on our program by including student statements
about their experience in physical education as part of the
supporting documentation I leave with the board. Leaving them
with a hard copy of your information allows you to go into
more detail about the benefits of your program. In the written
report we also include individual fitness and academic results
(anonymous of course) of students who have made great strides
in their health and fitness.
The overall impression that we want
to leave the board with is that the physical education program
is a valuable and indispensable program that produces proven
results in the health and fitness, and contributes to the
academic performance of our students. That impression is the
preventive medicine that will and has protected our program.
The last thing I leave the school board with is some kind
of "call to action." This past year I again asked for the
reformation of the district health and fitness committee.
I have been asking for this for three years. While I believe
we are getting closer, I will need to continue to advocate
for this until we have a functioning health and fitness committee.
This is the second of a three-part
series of articles on advocacy. In the last installment I
will discuss how to craft a powerful advocacy message. To
further enhance your advocacy skills consider attending Paul's
advocacy session that will be available at the AAHPERD National
Conference in St. Louis in April: Advocacy: Crafting Your
Message.
Paul Clinton teaches Physical Education
at Lakewood High School in Washington State. You can contact
Paul at: pclinton@lwsd.wednet.edu.
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