Obesity Stable Among South Dakota Kids

Governor Mike Rounds is holding legacy-pressers to take credit for increasing South Dakota jobs, GDP, and university enrollment. Does he also want to take credit for maintaining the percentage of heavy kids?

The South Dakota Department of Health reports lots of our kids are still fat. "For the 2009-2010 school year, 32.7% of students were either overweight (16.7%) or obese (16%)." We've seen a little slimming from last year, but the numbers have hardly budged from in academic year 2003–2004, when 15.8% of South Dakota kids were obese and another 16.1% overweight.

Now note if you read the DoH reports that they changed terminology in the AY 2006–2007 report. Before that, kids in the 85th to 94th percentile for body-mass index (BMI) were labeled "at risk of overweight," while kids at or above the 95th percentile were labeled "overweight." In '06&ndash'07, "overweight" became "obese" and "at risk" became "overweight."

Confusing, I know. Just drink less pop and ride more bike, would ya?

Early in the Rounds Administration, the Department of Health set a goal to "reduce the percent of school-age children and adolescents who are overweight or obese from 17% in 2003 to 15% by 2010.” With the wording change, that goal became "reduce the percent of school-age children and adolescents who are at or above the 95th percentile BMI for age (obese) from 17 percent in 2003 to 15 percent by 2010.” No such luck.

Interestingly, the number of underweight kids has increased, too. In AY 2003–04, 2.8% of students (27,245) were below the fifth percentile for body mass index. I can't find the 2009–10 report yet, but the 2008–09 report shows 3.9% of students (40,202) underweight.

I guess that's one more example of the middle class getting smaller.

Moms Use Web to Share Breast Milk in South Dakota

The dairy industry probably frowns on this: a friend recently sent me a link to the South Dakota chapter of a relatively new organization, Eats on Feets. The group started just last summer in Arizona to facilitate the sharing of human breast milk. Eats on Feets does not collect or sell breast milk; they simply provide a forum where moms can make connections and arrange their own deals to share the best food for babies.

Eats for Feets also provides all sorts of information on a topic that makes some people unreasonably queasy. Today's fun facts:

1. If you bottle breast milk, don't shake it! If you do, you'll mess up the molecules. Really!
2. There is no documented case of HIV transmission from a single shot of breast milk. Chemicals in breast milk work with time and cold to destroy HIV in expressed breast milk. But if you're sharing breast milk, you should still ask suppliers about their health background.
   
3. Various studies find that if we humans behaved more like our primate relatives, we would wean our offspring from breast milk at age 5 or later.
   

The Eats for Feets SD page links to ladies offering milk in Vermillion, Sioux Falls, and the Black Hills. Remember, moms, that milk has good bacteria eager to colonize your babies' tummies and keep them healthy!

But be careful, ladies: the dairy industry hates competition.

Voting for Daugaard? Ah, So You Like Cheating Kids...

Hey, all you folks giving Dennis Daugaard 70% favorables: are you paying attention to the status quo?

I generally don't like to give letters from the campaigns much space, but the following statement from Steve Jarding, Scott Heidepriem's campaign manager, gives a pretty straightforward assessment of the damage done under Mike Rounds's watch. Can we expect more of the same from a Governor Daugaard? Do you really want to take that chance?

Of all the misplaced priorities of the Rounds\Daugaard Administration, perhaps none is as alarming and inexplicable than their legacy with regard to our children. From the time Mike Rounds and Dennis Daugaard took office in 2003 through 2008 (before the national recession took hold) child poverty in South Dakota rose over 20 percent—we know it has continued to rise since then and likely has risen dramatically—official numbers for 2009 are not in yet. On top of this, South Dakota leads the nation in percentage of working moms and in the percentage of wage earners who hold multiple jobs. Many of these workers have no choice. They are trying to make ends meet with little support from Pierre.

One area of support for these children, these moms and these parents would have come in the form of the Birth to Three program. But Mike Rounds and Dennis Daugaard inexplicably did not support this program. Nor did they support the Pre-K program in South Dakota. Yet, literally every empirical study shows that these programs are arguably the best investment a state can make. Kids who have access to Birth to Three and Pre-K programs stay in school, get better grades, are healthier, are less likely to get in trouble, graduate in higher numbers, make a better living—the list goes on and on. But Mike Rounds and Dennis Daugaard do not support them—but they did support giving $38 million to TransCanada to build an oil pipeline they were building anyway. But they won't sell one of their taxpayer funded airplanes. But they won't give up their taxpayer funded vacation house in Custer State Park. But they will give their 19 top executive staff a $533,000 pay raise (of which Dennis Daugaard collected $63,000 of it back into his campaign coffers), and they will raid federal funds given to South Dakota for education and the poor, sticking the money into the general fund to spend covering up their debt -- all while our child poverty rate skyrockets.

We have to take South Dakota back. The lives of thousands of South Dakota's children are depending on it. Literally [links mine; text from Steve Jarding, campaign e-mail, 2010.10.12].

Would anyone care to point out which of Team Heidepriem's arguments here are wrong... or why you'd be willing to take four more years of this kid-unfriendly governing from a Daugaard Administration?

Big Brother at Your School: Check Tech Policy for UN Rights Violations

As you get ready to send your kids back to school (before Labor Day? far too early! it's still summer!), keep an eye out for those wordy Internet/Technology Use Agreements your kids will surely bring home for you to sign. Those are the hefty policies that basically say that if your kids touch a computer at school, the district owns their soul.

You might want to pay particular attention to the rules your school sets for monitoring your kids' computer usage at school, whether by spyware or even via webcam. As Web scholar Jill Walker Rettberg points out, your school may be violating the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Children (to which, yes, the United States is a signatory). Walker Rettberg highlights these two relevant articles of the UNCRC:

13. The child shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice.

16. No child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation.

Does your child enjoy those freedoms? I know ours does... in home school.
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Update 18:05 CDT: But oh my gosh: the kids are sexting! Aaaaccckk! Lock down all the computers! Confiscate all the cell phones!

Oh well: at least if they sext in a committed relationship, it won't hurt their grades.

Sesame Street Makes Teens Read More, Get Better Grades

Sesame Street turns 40 this week. I generally don't pay much attention to television (the lack of digital broadcast signals capable of reaching Lake Herman helps), but Sesame Street gets my love. Before the digital switchover, I would sit with my little one and enjoy Elmo and Cookie Monster as much as she did. Sesame Street just gets better as we get older.

I judged a debate contest at Roosevelt this weekend and heard new debaters arguing the merits of Head Start. If the young debaters are aiming at educational benefits, perhaps they should consider running plans based on Sesame Street:

Meanwhile, independent academic researchers have conducted more than 1,000 studies, making "Sesame Street" the most researched TV show in history.

One notable study reconnected with adolescents who had participated in "Sesame Street" research as preschoolers. It found that teens who watched "Sesame Street" in preschool had higher grades and spent more time reading for pleasure than other teens who had missed the show as children ["Sesame Street Still Big Bird's Nest After 40 Years," AP via MSNBC.com, 2009.11.09].

This may be the first time I've read about any research saying TV makes you smarter. Given that we're talking Sesame Street, I can believe it.

Now I'm not rushing to get cable so the divine Miss K doesn't fall behind her Bert-and-Ernie-blessed peers. Recent Nielsen numbers find 2–5-year-olds spending over 32 hours a week in front of a TV screen. Even without Sesame Street, I'm willing to bet our little one is coming out with a brain a little less mushy than average with her maybe 5 hours a week of Charlie and Lola and skunk and grizzly bear videos.

But a little more Big Bird can't hurt. (SDPB, turn up the wattage on your Brookings transmitter!)

More South Dakota Children Facing Abuse, Poverty

I've been looking over the Every Child Matters Education Fund report that came out last week saying South Dakota has the second worst rate in the nation of deaths from child abuse and neglect, behind only Kentucky. Of course, that's only 28 kids killed over a seven-year survey period. Only.

28 kids killed by their guardians. 28 adults, our neighbors, who could look their children in the eye and beat them, starve them... who are these monsters?

I shudder and turn away from seemignly intractable evil to peruse some other statistics:

We Americans kill more of our own kids than do our civilized neighbors:

Source: We Can Do Better, report of the Every Child Matters Education Fund, 2009, p. 8

What makes those other democracies such safer places for kids than America?

Among other things, teen pregnancy, violent crime, imprisonment, and poverty rates are much lower in these countries. Further, their social policies in support of families are much greater and typically include child care, universal health insurance, paid parental leave, visiting nurses, and more—all things which together can prevent child abuse and neglect in the first place.

The U.S. invests only modestly in similar preventive measures compared to the needs of the most vulnerable families. This serious social policy lapse creates an environment where child abuse and neglect are common—where preventable maltreatment fatalities are inevitable [We Can Do Better, 2009].

The Every Child Matters folks also chart children in poverty by state. From 2001 to 2008, the number of South Dakota children in poverty increased 50%. Our ranking nationwide in keeping kids out of poverty slipped from 17th to 34th.

Hmm... didn't I hear somewhere that 70% of Republicans think South Dakota is headed in the right direction? Four more years, Mr. Daugaard?