Education: The promise of physical education that goes beyond traditional sports

It's not an entirely new concept.

Long before his death in 2010, legendary baseball coach and physical education teacher Phil Lawler attracted national attention to Naperville's Madison Junior High School with the PE4Life organization he helped found. The program aimed to give students the foundation for a lifetime of fitness by focusing their attention not on traditional team sports they would be likely to put behind them in adulthood but on physical activities and healthy habits they could carry with them throughout their entire lives.

Now comes Elgin Area School District U-46 with a plan to study a similar model. Based on recommendations of the Illinois State Board of Education's Enhanced Physical Education Task Force Report and Illinois Physical Development and Health Standards, the program gets middle-school children involved in individual physical activities and exposes them to ideas and technologies that help them understand what it means to be physically fit and how they can monitor and improve their own personal fitness.

"Evidence just gets stronger and stronger that getting kids engaged in moderate to vigorous physical activity in physical education class yields the biggest benefits," says Michael Isaacson, an assistant community health director for the Kane County Health Department who served on the task force.

It also helps them learn. As Lawler's research found and the task force report reinforced, higher levels of physical activity are associated with improved performance in academic classes and on standardized tests.

If, as seems likely, it also helps them make physical activity a part of their routine long into adulthood, it also can help improve the quality of life for them personally and keep health care costs down for the society at large.

Officials at U-46 estimate that implementing the program at the district's eight middle schools would cost a little over $300,000, most of which would go toward technical equipment like heart-rate monitors and iPads. If they proceed, we expect they will make every effort to keep the costs down, for the concept is certainly worthy of study.

In a 2005 Daily Herald story about his work, Lawler explained how he came to see the need for programs that emphasized fitness for everyone, not just athletes.

When P.E. activities were built around football, for instance, he said, "The best athlete was quarterback, his best friend was a receiver and, literally, we had 20 kids standing around doing nothing. And we'd go out and do that every day, in every sport."

Clearly, that's not a strategy for building interest in fitness for every kid. The thinking in U-46 builds on Lawler's work and that of other districts paying increased attention to helping kids monitor their physical well-being. And it is a kind of thinking that offers promise for a healthier future for every adult.