Kansas Health Institute | Information For Policy Makers. Health for Kansans.

"It truly is an epidemic," said Mark Thompson, project director for the state"s Coordinated School Health program at the Kansas Department of Education. "We"re seeing children overweight and obese at levels we"ve never seen in the history of this country."

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about one in three of the nation"s children are obese or overweight.

Health experts assume that is the case in Kansas, too, though no one can be certain because there is no statewide measurement to tell otherwise. There has been some locally collected information that suggests the Kansas prevalence might be even more alarming.

Topeka"s Seaman School District is one of the few in the state known to be measuring its students" body mass index, which is considered the most reliable gauge of obesity.

Claudia Welch, a Seaman physical education instructor and anti-obesity crusader, said the latest BMI measurements by school nurses showed that 39.4 percent of the district"s third-grade boys were overweight or obese; so were 35.9 percent of the girls. Even more frightening, 54.7 percent of fourth-grade boys had the problem.

"Now you see why we want to get a handle on things," Welch said.

Studies show that children who are obese are 70 to 80 percent more likely to be obese as adults.

And with obesity comes type 2 diabetes, heart disease and other maladies that are some of the biggest cost drivers in the increasingly expensive health-care system.

The Bogalusa Heart Study , which has been ongoing since 1972, has shown that the major causes of adult heart disease begin in childhood and overweight or obese children are among those most at risk.

The response

Thompson said he is convinced that if childhood obesity were a contagious disease, parents and others would be pounding on the doors of government leaders, seeking a response to the problem.

"If your child is running a fever, has a cough, you feel like you need to address that right now," Thompson said. "But if the child is overweight or not very active, you may not see the immediacy of the problem. It might be 30 or 40 years before they have a serious health problem. There"s not really a huge signal telling parent to jump on it at that point. And we tend to comfort ourselves saying it"s a stage they"re going through."

Thompson said parents also often don"t want to face up to the "the painful recognition that they"re part of the problem."

In Kansas, at least, those leading the charge against the problem have tended to be front-line workers in schools the nurses, PE teachers and building principals. They see the children in groups and can"t ignore the scope of the problem.

But their efforts to combat "the epidemic" are done with quite limited resources and the little time available to them in the school day, though most agree it will be a losing battle if parents and the community or society at large don"t wake up and join in.

The program that Thompson manages is funded by foundations and CDC grants that bring in about $350,000 a year. But that money isn"t dedicated solely to combating childhood obesity. It also must pay for anti-tobacco activities and other health-related efforts. Given the resources, he said he"s pleased that about one in six Kansas school districts have been enrolled in the program.

"Based on the amount of funding," he said, "we feel pretty good about that impact."

Thompson said he believes relatively inexpensive steps could go a long way: More physical activity within the school day and removing junk foods from school vending machines.

A handful of legislators have joined the cause and have introduced bills that would require statewide BMI measurements or beef up physical education requirements or limit junk foods. But so far, those ideas have not found enough support to make it into law.

The Kansas board of education also could require schools statewide to take some of those steps.

But members have so far shown no interest in those sorts of mandates even as they discourage legislators from ordering them, too.

"Most of us on the board believe pretty strongly in local control, and that the decision should be left to local school boards," said board member Carol Rupe of Wichita.

But for the most part, local school boards and administrators have focused on the more immediate and day-to-day concerns of running school districts, responding to the problem with varying degrees of interest once front-line workers get something started.

Here is a brief rundown of what some Kansas school districts have been doing: