VANCOUVER - With one in four B.C. school-age children overweight or obese, the provincial government has launched a shape-up plan it says is the most aggressive in Canada.
The B.C. Education Ministry will require all students to have at least 30 minutes of physical activity a day by next September and accelerate a plan to clear out junk foods from schools starting in January.
"We are the only jurisdiction that has looked at mandatory daily physical activity for K (kindergarten) through Grade 12,'' Bond told reporters in a conference call Tuesday.
"So this would position us as leaders in the country.''
The ambitious initiative is being greeted warmly by the province's educators.
"Healthy and active children are teachable children,'' Les Dukowski, president of the B.C. Principals and Vice-Principals Association, said in a news release
Many of the policy's nuts and bolts still have to be worked out, Bond said. A number of so-called leader school districts will be used to test programs and techniques on the way to full implementation covering 560,000 students in public schools and 60,000 in independent schools.
"I don't think it will look the same across the province,'' said Bond. "The expectation will remain the same.''
The goal, she said is to embed the habits of regular activity and healthy eating in students in hopes they'll keep up the lifestyle as adults.
British Columbians generally track ahead of other Canadians when it comes to levels of health and fitness. But that hasn't made the province immune from the trend towards increasingly unfit kids.
"We are still trending the wrong way with respect to childhood obesity,'' Gordon Hogg, minister for ActNow B.C., said in an interview.
"So we are leading but it's not a very good reference group that we are being compared against.''
Hogg's ministerial mandate is to make British Columbia the healthiest jurisdiction to hold an Olympics when Vancouver and Whistler host the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games.
The number of Canadian children who walk or bicycle to school has dropped to 20 per cent from more than 50 per cent in the 1980s, he said. A quarter of kids' waking hours are spent before a video screen of some kind.
"We've become pretty sedentary and super-sized and it's how we start to deal with those two things, the activity and the intake.''
Physical education is mandatory in B.C. schools up to Grade 10 and that won't change.
"Phys-ed alone does not address this,'' said Hogg.
Under the new policy, schools will offer a half hour of physical activity each day, either in school or during breaks.
Non-school activities such as sports, dance classes, biking or even walking to school can be counted against each student's 30-minute requirement, as will phys ed classes.
Students in Grades 10 to 12 will get a more flexible guideline of 150 minutes a week. They must already show they've done 80 hours of physical activity before they graduate, Bond noted.
The province is also speeding up restrictions on foods that can be sold in cafeterias, vending machines and fundraising events.
Foods in the not-recommended and choose-least categories will be expanded in line with changes to the Canada Food Guide that put more red flags against salty and sugary foods.
Starting in January in elementary schools and next September in middle and high schools, sales of those foods will end -- a year ahead of schedule.
Schools already have been working to cut the amount of junk food available to kids, said Penny Tees, president of the B.C. School Trustees Association.
"Certainly I'd say the last two to three years there's been much more attention within schools and districts about healthy choices,'' she said from Winlaw, B.C., near Nelson. "Some districts have taken a stronger lead than others.''
Tees said it's important that individual schools and school districts be able to apply the new policies in ways that work for them.
"It's not something you just want to impose,'' she said. "It will come from the ground up, I think, and every school will have its own approach.''
Tees and both ministers say parents play an important role in making the policy work, in ensuring they pack nutritious lunches for their kids and act as role models when it comes to fitness and healthy eating.
But Bond conceded there's nothing to prevent students from bringing what they want to school.
"We know that young people today have certainly got minds of their own and many of them will choose to go to the convenience store next door to the school,'' she said.
But many schools are already junk-food free and have launched their own fitness activities, helped by her ministry's Action Schools program.
Bond got a first-hand experience when she took part in a 10-minute classroom"chair aerobics'' session at a Vancouver elementary school.
"I can tell you it was a fairly vigorous workout.''
