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Committee endorses bill to repeal mandatory BMI measurement Friday, Jan 26, 2007 By Rob Moritz LITTLE ROCK - A House committee Thursday endorsed a bill that would repeal the state-mandated body mass index measurement of public school children. The House Education Committee voted 15-5 to send the legislation to the House following a 90-minute public hearing during which child health advocates urged members to vote down the measure. They said the BMI has become an important tool in combating childhood obesity. House Bill 1173 by Rep. Keven Anderson, R-Rogers, which would strip the BMI provision from a four-year-old law, is expected to be debated by the House today. Act 1220 of 2003 of was a key component of former Gov. Mike Huckabee's Healthy Arkansas Initiative. Along with measuring the body mass of students, the law created the Child Health Advisory Committee to develop a variety of school nutrition guidelines. The state Board of Education adopted the guidelines in 2005. Among them are rules prohibiting schools from rewarding students with food, requiring schools to offer healthier lunches and stock vending machines with low-fat and low-sugar snacks and drinks. "There are some excellent aspects of ACT 1220," Anderson said during the committee meeting. "This bill just removes the mandate off our schools to do the BMI test," he said. The measure was filed, Anderson said, after he received numerous complaints from parents who oppose the program. He said students who receive their results and learn they are overweight are often stigmatized. Anderson also said schools should spend more time teaching students, and that conducting the annual BMI test is time-consuming and requires additional duties for nurses who do the testing. He also said parents should be addressing the problems their children might have with weight. "Ultimately, kids are going to emulate the behavior of their parents, and if we want to really address this issue we need to do it as adults first and clean up our act," Anderson said. "That is something you just can't legislative. You got to expect the parents to take responsibility." Anderson said his bill would not prohibit school districts, if they wanted, from conducting the annual BMI. Dr. Gary Wheeler, who spoke for the Arkansas chapter of the American Association of Pediatrics, said obesity among school children has become a big problem in Arkansas. "There are certain things that are so grave in this society that mandates are warranted," he said. "This is one." Supporters of the test reminded committee members that since the first BMI screening three years ago, the percentage of overweight students or students at risk of becoming overweight has fallen slightly from 38 percent to 37.5 percent. Rhonda Sanders, who has a child in the Bryant School District, testified that her daughter had struggled with her weight and after receiving her BMI results, she and the rest of the family began eating better and exercising. Sanders said her daughter has lost a significant amount of weight and now is considered healthy on the BMI index. Tom Kimbrell, executive director of the Arkansas Association of Educational Administrators, spoke for Anderson's bill. Kimbrell said his son recently had his body mass measured, and said while it did not seem to bother his son, one child in his son's class cried because he did not want the nurse to know how much he weighed. Wanda Wells, who recently retired from the Newport School District where she worked as a nurse, testified that the test took a lot of time. She said school nurses already do vision, hearing and scoliosis tests on students, and are required to make sure every student's immunization records are accurate. "It took three months out of my year" to do the BMI tests, she said, adding the measurements were done when she was not busy dealing with regular school nursing tasks, like cleaning cuts, dealing with asthma attacks and head lice. "It's a paper work nightmare," she said. The 2003 law drew criticism from parents who complained their children would be subjected to ridicule. The Legislature later changed reporting requirements to try and keep individual results private. A study released this week showed that 68 percent of parents said they were comfortable receiving the BMI reports on their children. Sixty-four percent said they were aware of the confidentiality safeguards and were not concerned about classmates learning of their child's BMI results. Eighty-five percent of the students surveyed said they were comfortable with the BMI measurement and reporting. The report found that the number of students teased because of their BMI result dropped from 9 percent in 2005 to 6 percent in 2006. The study found that the average number of student purchases from food vending machines declined from 10 per month in 2004 to three per month in 2006. |
