Advocating for Our Profession: Presenting to Your School Board (Part 2)

Advocacy is preventive medicine and in this second in a series of three articles on advocating for your profession it’s worth reviewing the first of the three rules of advocacy that I laid out in Part 1. The First rule of advocacy is Do Some – It Works.

For advocacy to truly be preventive you must do some and one of the best places to advocate is with your school board. School board meetings are public venues where a wide range of decision makers and policy influencers are present. It’s a perfect setting in which to direct and influence the discussion and understanding of health, physical activity, and the role a quality physical education program plays in the development of our children. When and what you present to the School Board will be crucial in determining how effective your advocacy is and whether it is truly preventive medicine.

In my previous article, I pointed out the parallels between martial arts and job protection and made the case for an offensive-defense strategy. In martial arts you want to make your opponent think twice before even attempting to hit you. In physical education, offensive-defense is what you do when times are good to ensure that your district will not even consider attacking your program during tough economic times. The time to advocate with your school board is not when there is trouble but when things are going well and you have a positive story to tell.

It is very hard to change harmful decisions once they have been made and advocacy that starts at this point amounts to shoring up the levy after the flood. You may feel good about your valiant effort and the justice of your fight but you will probably lose. So if you are comfortable with the standing of your program in your district and you do not fear program cuts, then now is a perfect time to apply some preventive medicine and make a presentation to your school board. If your program is threatened then you do not have a moment to lose and you need to start the advocacy process immediately.

Before you plan your school board presentation you must ask yourself one vital question: Is your program defensible?

Try answering the following questions about your program:

• Do you keep longitudinal physical activity/fitness data for all your students?
• Can you show a record of improvement in these numbers?
• Can you tie your physical activity/fitness data to academic performance?
• Do all of your students take any state mandated physical education assessments?
• Can you show yearly improvement in these scores?
• Can you document skill improvement in your students?
• Do you have other data to show what students are learning in your classes?

If you can answer “yes” to most of these questions then you have a highly defensible program and this can be the basis for a very positive presentation to your school board. If your answer is “no” to most of these questions, you risk standing before the board and having to answer some very uncomfortable questions such as “Can you prove your program is effective?” or “All of our other teachers are expected to document student improvement, if you can’t do that, why keep you?”

We are going to work under the assumption that you do have an outstanding program and a great story to tell. In our offensive-defense strategy we not only want to deliver a timely punch but a punch that carries some weight. It is not enough to just lecture on the importance of what you do. You need to show actual results for your program. Objective data showing how your program is improving kids physically and mentally is a punch that cannot be ignored.

It is one thing to tell someone that childhood obesity is a national problem and exercise is part of the solution. But it would have much more impact if you could show actual statistics that there are fewer overweight kids in your program this year than there were last year? Your school board members may be mildly interested in national statistics, but they will be deeply engrossed in data about the children in their district and these kinds of stats make a great starting point for your school board presentation.

I always start my school board presentations with a review of the past year’s fitness testing results. This guarantees that I have the board members’ and the audience’s full attention as there is nothing they are more interested in than the children in their district. Often I will preface it with a question such as “Can public education have an impact on the health and fitness of students?” Following are some of the ways I use our fitness results when presenting to the school board.

• Compare fall and spring results to highlight improvements and connect them to our PE program.
• Compare spring and fall results to highlight the decrease in fitness that happens to students over the summer when they are not in our PE program.
• Link fitness to academics by comparing GPA and the number of fitness tests passed. Kids who pass all fitness items on average rank at the top of GPA and kids who pass few or no fitness items rank at the bottom of GPA.
• I ask, “What is the likelihood of a student having at least one “F” grade based on their fitness test results?” At my school those who pass all fitness tests are much less likely to have an “F” in any class.

You can also use fitness stats to highlight problems that the board and district administration can help you solve as well as problems we are solving on our own. Only half as many 6th graders can pass all five of our fitness tests compared to 8th graders. Physical education in our elementary schools is only once a week for 30 minutes compared to the every other day for 50 minutes that we have at the middle school. We are constantly playing catch up with our 6th graders and this makes a good case for the district to increase elementary physical education time.

We also show the school board the number of kids you are physically at risk and how these numbers decrease over the course of the school year. This provides a perfect opportunity to introduce them to the programs we have developed to target these at-risk kids such as:

• Adopt a pedometer.
• Caught in the act eating a healthy lunch.
• Cougar fitness awards.
• Fitness contests with other middle schools.

While statistics and what they mean and how they drive our program make up the bulk of what needs to be a fairly brief presentation, a school board meeting is also a good time for some general education and putting a human face on your program. A few years ago, for dramatic impact I quickly showed the CDC obesity map slides from 1985 to 2010. While most physical educators are familiar with this information it was new material for most of the board and audience. We also take a year-end survey of what students’ value in our PE program and show the board the top five.

The board was impressed that fitness testing always makes the top 5 as well as some other non-traditional activities such as social dance and self-defense. We also put a human face on our program by including student statements about their experience in physical education as part of the supporting documentation I leave with the board. Leaving them with a hard copy of your information allows you to go into more detail about the benefits of your program. In the written report we also include individual fitness and academic results (anonymous of course) of students who have made great strides in their health and fitness.

The overall impression that we want to leave the board with is that the physical education program is a valuable and indispensable program that produces proven results in the health and fitness, and contributes to the academic performance of our students. That impression is the preventive medicine that will and has protected our program. The last thing I leave the school board with is some kind of “call to action.” This past year I again asked for the reformation of the district health and fitness committee. I have been asking for this for three years. While I believe we are getting closer, I will need to continue to advocate for this until we have a functioning health and fitness committee.

This is the second of a three-part series of articles on advocacy. In the last installment I will discuss how to craft a powerful advocacy message. To further enhance your advocacy skills consider attending Paul’s advocacy session that will be available at the AAHPERD National Conference in St. Louis in April: Advocacy: Crafting Your Message.