Education Week - March 15, 2023 - 5

turned allocations of less than $1,000
each because the funds wouldn't have
been worth the time and paperwork
necessary to receive them, said Kimberly
Houghton, a spokesperson for
the state education department.
The 105-student Bickleton district
in Washington stood to get an
even larger haul-roughly $80,000,
or $761 per student, over the three
rounds of funds. But that figure
dwarfed the amount of COVID-related
expenses the district incurred.
" Who ultimately is gonna pay this
ESSER money? The taxpayers, " said
Kim Clinton, the district's chief financial
officer. " Why in the world
would we tax our 80-year-old neighbor
when we didn't really need the
money? "
That's not to say the money would
have gone to waste had the district accepted
it. " It would have been lovely to
have that amount of money come in to
spend, " Clinton said. " But we wouldn't
have been able to spend it directly on
COVID [as the law requires]. We
would have to be a little imaginative. "
As the only person working on finances
in her district, which consists
of a one-room school house, Clinton
said she didn't have the capacity to
plot out how the district could spend
the federal funds in compliance with
rules governing how schools could
use them.
" I can tell you every single penny
that I spent in our district, " Clinton
said. " In the school board meeting, I
go over every single bill. "
WHAT THE
RESEARCH SAYS
Students Need
More Exercise.
Here's How to Add
Activity Without
Disrupting Learning
By Sarah D. Sparks
Sharie Murray noticed the benefits of
getting kids moving during the pandemic.
The K-3 special education teacher and
her colleagues at North Elementary School
in Birch Run, Mich., started to use short
exercise videos to keep students occupied
during waiting times over Zoom, but Murray
said getting students' blood moving also
helped them focus more during the virtual
class periods.
" It was amazing, " Murray said. " The
cation. It leads those people through
a series of courses, then they receive
hands-on experience working with
a more experienced teacher before
they eventually receive their license.
Homegrown talent
Muri said the district's shift in
mentality-from passively posting a
staff opening to an online job board
to actively cultivating future teachers-came
when leaders examined
research showing nearly 60 percent
of new teachers hired in New York
state over the course of the three
years studied worked within 15 miles
of where they attended high school.
It was a lightbulb moment for the
district's leaders, who hadn't previously
considered how geography
might affect staffing trends.
To be sure, the trend has held true
for Ector County, where about 60 percent
of the district's teachers grew up
locally, Muri said.
The district realized investing
in long-term solutions rather than
Band-Aid fixes would yield the greatest
rewards, Muri said, and Ector
County leaders are hopeful others
will follow suit.
" Yes, we're in a crisis. But we have
to play the long game, because the
crisis isn't going to go away in one or
two years, " Muri said. " It's going to
be here for a while, and it will be here
forever unless we do something about
it. So, here, we've decided to do something,
and it's making a difference. "
[activity] break allows the kids to escape a
bit, use their energy to perform a dance or
workout piece or whatever, and then the kids
are able to regroup and then focus on the
task at hand. And once we were able to get
back into the norm in class, we wanted to
pilot it " in person.
North Elementary and others in the Birch
Run area school district have been ramping
up short, four- to five-minute activity breaks
as part of InPACT, short for Interrupting
Prolonged sitting with ACTivity, a University
of Michigan-Ann Arbor program focused
on boosting physical activity in classrooms
to improve students' fitness, attention, and
mental health. In the process, researchers
and educators hope to make the common
class activity break more high-impact.
" This isn't something new, but [schools]
are just not doing activity breaks consistently
and they're running into too many barriers, "
said Rebecca Hasson, an associate professor
of movement science and the director
of the Childhood Disparities Research
Laboratory at the University of MichiganAnn
Arbor. " There are so many things
being put on a teacher's plate right now.
Sometimes classroom activity breaks and
physical activity programs are just one more
thing that teachers have to fit into their
curriculum, one more thing that they have to
try to organize. "
While the vast majority of K-8 teachers
report using at least some physical activity
breaks in their classes, Hasson and her
colleagues found that only about 1 in 5
teachers provide at least 10 minutes a day of
moderate-to-vigorous activity during class.
That's the minimum recommended by the
American College of Sports Medicine for
school-age children and adolescents, and it
requires exercise intense enough that a child
boosts his heart rate and perspires, but can
still talk without gasping for breath.
The need to get kids moving has become
more urgent in the last few years. U.S.
children and adolescents get 17 fewer
minutes a day of even moderate exercise
today than they did before 2020, and fewer
Students in Brooke Smith's class dance during an exercise routine as part of the InPACT
program at North Elementary School in Birch Run, Mich., on March 2.
than 1 in 10 of those ages 6-17 now meet
the federal recommendations of at least
60 minutes total of moderate-to-vigorous
daily exercise, according to the U.S. Report
Card on Physical Activity for Children and
Youth. That's less than half the share of
children who got enough exercise in 2018.
And the drops in exercise were especially
pronounced among students in poverty.
While activity breaks have gained traction
in schools in the last decade, large-scale
studies of physical activity in the classroom
have shown mixed effects based on the
wide variation in how schools implement
them.
" It appears from the outside that school is
one of the ideal settings [to increase students'
activity levels], " said Joseph Donnelly,
professor of internal medicine and director
of physical activity and weight management
science at the University of Kansas Medical
Center. He studies the long-term effects of
school-based physical activity programs.
" Schools have the physical structure, a history
of physical education, so they're delivering
some sort of movement, they have educated
people-it seems sort of like a no-brainer.
But it's very difficult in the modern school
to get teachers on board to sacrifice time for
physical activity. "
Lifting barriers to exercise
Hasson and her colleagues found that
higher-poverty schools tended to have
more barriers to implementing physical
activity breaks effectively: They had less
free space, fewer resources, and teacher
professional development options related
to integrating physical activity in class, and
more pressure to use school time only for
academic instruction. And while most of the
high-poverty schools Hasson studied did
have student wellness policies, they focused
mainly on nutrition rather than exercise.
Classroom activity was not integrated
into the schools' broader plans for student
wellness.
As a result, the higher-poverty schools
averaged only about eight minutes of activity
breaks a day, compared to 16 minutes a day
in high-income, highly resourced schools.
" That compounds over time as you look
at that per week, per month, per academic
year, considering all the different benefits
that come with regular physical activity
and engagement in the classroom ...
because high-resourced schools already
have many different opportunities for kids
to be physically active inside and outside
of school, " Hasson said. " That's why
implementation and equity have to go hand
in hand. "
Teachers participating in InPACT were
trained in how to manage classroom behavior
during breaks, guide students' exercise
intensity using prompts and tempo cues,
and arrange their classroom spaces to make
it easier to transition to and from activities.
Educators also had access to a library of 200
activities and short videos they could use
during breaks.
Kristine Paquette, the principal of
Birch Run's North Elementary, said some
teachers use the activity breaks to reinforce
lessons, such as kindergarten teachers
using counting songs or phonics. But
Heather Erwin, a professor of kinesiology
and health promotion at the University
of Kentucky and editor of the Journal
of Teaching in Physical Education, said
analyses of dozens of studies find activity
breaks that include academic content
don't seem to be more or less effective in
boosting students' attention and activity
levels. It's more important that students
keep their heart rates up over the break and
do a few breaks over the course of the day.
" You can have these 'exercise snacks' ...
these small bursts throughout the day, " said
Hasson, who structured InPACT around
four-minute activity breaks scattered
through the day. " So, 20 minutes sounds
very overwhelming to a teacher who has
not implemented activity breaks, but we
can start with one break, allow teachers to
establish their classroom procedures and
then they can increase it over time as the
breaks become more comfortable for them
and their students. Even with one minute,
you can start to see improvements in energy
and refocusing, but we have found that four
minutes gives you a nice burst of energy and
primes the brain for learning. "
From academic recovery to student mental health, teachers and education leaders are grappling with big questions and challenges. This research column aims to help
readers understand what the research says-and doesn't say-about the current context for learning and learning in general. If you have a question, please send it to
ssparks@educationweek.org.
EDUCATION WEEK | March 15, 2023 | www.edweek.org | 5
Emily Elconin for Education Week

http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - March 15, 2023

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