Chances are, you recognize that schoolyard chant. Maybe you were the target, or maybe it was someone else. It doesn’t really matter now, does it?
Except, perhaps, for the lifelong damage such taunting can do to a developing self-esteem.
Which is one of the reasons parents in the Denver Public School District are outraged over the administration’s notices concerning childhood obesity. As part of their effort to improve students’ health, the school system is now noting a child’s BMI on health evaluation forms. If the child is overweight, the notice clearly says so.
Then the child is given the notice to take home to their parents.
“The part that upset her the most as she started reading it, there it stated that she was overweight and she started to cry saying, ‘Mom, that school tells me I’m fat.’ So, it was very heart wrenching,” said Flaurette Martinez.
Her daughter Isabel was sent home from the Centennial K-8 School on Monday with the health notice.
As Martinez points out, anyone could have found that notice had her daughter dropped or misplaced it. With kids being the way they are, Isabel’s future on the low-end of the schoolyard social pecking order would have been sealed. Granted, it’s possible such peer pressure could, in fact, lead Isabel to lose weight, but it’s equally probable that it could also lead to an eating disorder.
Besides, aren’t schools supposed to be doing their best to reduce bullying? Are fat kids “fair game” if such pressure might lead to improved physical health (at the possible expense of their emotional well-being)?
The school district states that it feels compelled to provide such information to parents to help improve student health. In the administration’s opinion, sending that data home with the child in a sealed envelope is sufficient.
You know, because kids would never open a sealed envelope that someone else dropped.
/contempt
Chubby Mommy 
Edna