New York Weighing Children

We all know that obesity has been a major problem for the past several years. There have been many suggestions on how to solve this problem and this has had an affect on everyone, even our school children. As a matter of fact, as public schools open in New York, the returning students will be weighed and will have their Body Mass Index reported.

In order to combat the increasing amount of childhood obesity, a law passed in 2007 that required public schools outside of New York City to take note of students’ weights and Body Mass Indexes. Students now have to have a student health certificate. This is mandatory for attendance at all New York schools. The set of data that will be retrieved from this will make it easier for health officials to compare and contrast the rates of obesity based on location.
This procedure is required for half of the schools in New York and will alternate to the other half the following year. This allows the state to estimate the obesity for the whole state and the individual counties as well.
All information is confidential and will be collected from school entry. Other grades that will go through this process are second, fourth, seventh, and 10th grades. This information will be collected by the Department of Health. Parents are provided with the option to decide if they want their child’s information included in the study.
There was a prototype for this idea that started during the last school year for 97 schools. Since December of 2007, there have been at least 12 other states that have had some sort of student Body Mass Index reporting and in 2004; there was a health survey that reported that 21% of the third graders in New York were obese.