Bellevue school district gets students moving

During a recent gym class at Kawana Academy of Arts and Sciences, about 60 first-graders hopped, skipped and jumped their way around a series of stations set up in a grassy field as kid-oriented workout music boomed.

“Excellent job stretching!” teacher Luis Patrick shouted Monday to one cluster of students as he ran to another and started demonstrating push-ups.

The class marked a shift at the south Santa Rosa elementary school and the other three schools in the Bellevue Union School District, where until this year there was no organized physical education class for kindergarten through third grade.

Until this fall, Patrick was the district’s lone gym teacher. He spent his week rotating among schools, providing each fourth- through sixth-grade class with a half-hour of gym instruction per week. Other than that, it fell to teachers to take kids outside “when they got squirrelly,” Kawana Academy second-grade teacher Chris Wilson said.

But this fall, the district was able to hire three part-time gym teachers and some instructional aides to provide three structured, half-hour physical education sessions per week to students in kindergarten through sixth grade.

The move is one of many the district is taking this year to improve students’ health and wellness, based on a belief that doing so will help improve their academic performance as well, Superintendent Alicia Henderson said. It’s made possible by a shift in how the state funds schools by providing greater flexibility to school districts in how they spend money and allocating additional funding to districts, like Bellevue, that serve higher-needs students.

Ninety-four percent of Bellevue’s students receive free and reduced-price lunch; 74 percent are English-language learners, Henderson said.

As a result, Bellevue’s state funding increased by almost 8 percent, or ?$1.5 million, this school year over the year previous, she said. The district’s budget this year is around $20.6 million.

“We already knew how important health and well-being are to learning, but now that we have funding in place, our efforts are more intentional, deliberate,” Henderson said.

After holding community meetings last year to determine priorities under the new state funding formula, the district set a goal of expanding physical education and allocated about $212,000 to the cause. That pays for instructors as well as teacher training, curriculum and supplies like soccer and basketball equipment that schools will share.

Other health-oriented measures include participation in a program where students run the equivalent of a marathon over the school year, creating school lunches within the district rather than hiring an outside agency to make them, and a partnership with a local dentist to provide free dental sealants to students.

Teachers say they’ve noticed a change in students’ behavior as a result of the additional physical activity.

“This is the first year we’ve had (gym) so often and it’s made a big difference as far as when kids come back to class,” Bellevue Elementary fifth-grade teacher Nina Bishop said. “They’re sweaty and tired, but it’s a good kind,” she said. “Their bodies are tired but their minds aren’t.”

Before this year, she and other teachers would take students outside when they could. Teachers’ approaches to this time “varied widely,” she said. Some held more structured activities like flag football, but others simply took students outside for free time.

The gym class also provides her with additional planning time where she can meet with other fifth-grade teachers and compare notes.

The schools’ new physical education program goes beyond the state requirement that elementary students receive 200 minutes of physical education every 10 days by providing students with structured instruction from teachers specially trained to teach gym, Henderson said.

This October, the PE teachers and their assistants attended a training session on a PE curriculum called SPARK. They are using that curriculum combined with lessons Patrick, now the district’s PE coordinator, developed during his three years at Bellevue Union.

It includes a number of units where students master different activities, from soccer and basketball to bowling, circus skills and multicultural dance.

On Monday, he had first-graders rotate through activities meant to teach them teamwork, spatial awareness and rhythm - building blocks for more advanced sports they’ll learn in higher grades, he said.

The 30-minute session ended with an activity where students hopped around a field of neon-colored rings in a version of musical chairs where they had to stick a foot in one of the rings when the music stopped. When Patrick hit pause on the iPod, the kids all scrambled for a ring, squealing.

Then it was time to head back to class.

Wilson, the second-grade teacher, said not only has he seen a “huge, huge change in students” in class - he’s also heard them talk about how much they like gym.

“He creates these activities the students really like to do,” he said of Patrick. “You don’t see any kids sitting down.”

Staff Writer Jamie Hansen blogs about education at extracredit.blogs.press?democrat.com. You can reach her at 521-5205 or jamie.hansen@pressdemo?crat.com. On Twitter @jamiehansen.