BMI Form

As some of you may recall, last year the district's PE department decided that they would be weighing SPS students (measuring their BMI) starting in 3rd grade. A parent at one of Sherry Carr's community meetings had expressed worry over the possible ill effects to students. Sherry concurred because she thought it might be an issue for her own child.

What came to pass was that the form was to opt-in. Meaning, unless you signed the form, you did not give permission to weigh your child. That's what opting-in means.

So I heard from a parent recently who said that the form is a little confusing. It says at the top it is an "Opt-in Permission Form" but it says sign this if you DON'T want your child to participate and then it ALSO says the parent gives permission and then a place for a signature for that as well. I can see where the confusion could be because if it is opt-in, you sign. If not, then you haven't given permission. There shouldn't be two signatures (unless the district is trying to the the parent to sign off on one thing or the other - then the title at the top should be changed).

This parent did write to the district PE director, Lori Dunn, who stated it IS an "opt-in only". What may have happened is that they distributed the form from last year without corrections.

Is this the biggest deal in the world? Not for most people but if you have the child who has body issues, it could be very upsetting if a parent/guardian was not able to convey his/her wishes to the child's PE teacher and the child gets weighed. (Last time we discussed this, there were a number of people, me included, who did not like being measured in school.)

In the bigger picture, it is just one, in a long, long line, of communications errors. Does no one ever read these things out loud? (Reading it out loud really helps you "hear" what might confuse someone else.) Or pass it to someone and say, "Does this make sense to you? Would you know what you are being asked to do?" And, given that Director Carr made special note of this at a Board meeting last year, don't you think someone might have said, "I need to make sure we update this form."

But Communications in this district is really PR, not about making sure that parents and the public are informed in a clear, timely and useful fashion about how SPS works. And a lot of that PR is directed towards making sure the Superintendent looks good. I wish some of that effort might go to making sure parents know what's going on.