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Schools to Monitor Obese Students, Raising Privacy Fears
As a Long Island district uses electronic monitors to keep track of the physical activity of obese students; critics call it an invasion of privacy.
Some students in Long Island schools will soon be asked to wear electronic monitors in a controversial effort to allow school officials to track kids’ physical activity around the clock.
In the spring, the athletics chair for Bay Shore schools will hand out 10 Polar Active monitors to selected overweight students. The $90 wristwatch-like devices count heartbeats, detect motion and even track students’ sleeping habits in a bid to combat obesity, writes Mary Kay Linge at the New York Post.
The information can then be accessed by a password-protected Web site that students and educators can access. The devices have already raised privacy concerns among some parents and observers in school districts in St. Louis and South Orange, NJ, where they have already been implemented.
But Ted Nagengast, the Bay Shore athletics chair, defended the measure, saying:
“It’s a great reinforcement in fighting the obesity epidemic. It tells kids, in real time, ‘Am I active? Am I not active?’ We want to give kids the opportunity to become active.”
In the South Orange-Maplewood School District similar devices have been in use for two years. The heart-rate monitors and activity sensors results even have an effect on upper-grade students’ marks in physical education.
However, critics of the program – including privacy advocates and parents – believe that the schools have been using the electronic monitors without families’ knowledge or consent.
Beth Huebner, a St. Louis mother whose 4th grade son wore a Polar Active monitor in class without her OK last fall at Ross Elementary School, said:
“I didn’t even know it was going on, and I’m active in the school.
“We have gotten no information about the Web-site security or where the data will go.”
Jay Stanley, of the American Civil Liberties Union, said:
“When you get into monitoring people’s biological vital signs, that’s a pretty intrusive measurement.
“There are key privacy interests at play.”
Stanley believes parents must have a right to say in how long the data will be stored and who will have access to it.
“A program like this should only be voluntary. Nobody should be forced to reveal biological indicators,” he said.
Virginia Rezmierski, an expert on information technology and privacy at the University of Michigan, believes that privacy is the key issue.
“Does the data pass along with the child from school to school? When will insurance companies want to get access to it? Will a school want to medicate a child that the monitor identifies as hyperactive? It’s potentially very dangerous ground.”
This comes after the U.S. Department of Agriculture published new nutrition guidelines for school meals, but many believe the implementation of such regulations will be expensive when money is tight for most school districts.
Critics are calling the guidelines, which were developed by the USDA, too expensive and impractical.
The regulations came in to supplement the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, which aims to battle the damning statistic that one out of three American children is overweight or obese.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack pointed out that many students get up to half of their daily calories at school and that rigorous nutritional standards are an important step in combating childhood obesity.
Wednesday
January 18th, 2012
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Comments
Implementing a program that will improve nutrition for every student is too expensive, but branding fat kids with $90 microchips and monitoring them without their parents’ consent is just fine? What is wrong with people?
I have to admit, my first reaction is “how humiliating for those poor kids!’ And my second is a very real privacy concern. I suppose it would be ok if the school ran this past the parents first and gave students the option to wear these instead of requiring them to, but the way this school does it makes me hugely uncomfortable.
The kids obesity epidemic is a real thing and not just something invented to mess with precious self-esteem of little children. This is a problem that will hamper them now and destroy them later. Maybe a little puncture of their idea of themselves would be a good thing to motivate them to lose the weight so they can be healthier and more productive and live longer lives. They can work out their psychological ouchies aquired in elementary school with all those extra years of life they can spend on the shrink’s couch.
January 20, 2012 at 6:26 pm
This information is absolutely false. The source is the NY post which is not known to be a hotbed of facts. Here are the facts: The devices are only used with parental consent and only with volunteer students. No one is forced to wear them. No one has to wear them at night. They are educational tools for student who are interested to personally know how active they are. Just like a text book, a student signs one out and then brings it back to the school after use with all their personal information cleared. No information is downloaded, stored or recorded at all by anyone at the school. Before you publish things, check your facts.
Anyway, the devices wouldn’t be needed at all if some parents stopped neglecting their children in a way that they don’t spend as much time with them as they could which can finally lead to obesity or even more serious emotional problems. Today’s parents simply don’t realize that children need to interact and cooperate with others in order to develop healthy relationships later in life. That’s why I visited as many baby-centers in Toronto as possible when my children were born. I discovered a number of funny ways to build a strong relationship and I always try to spend as much of my free time as possible with them to avoid similar problems in their adolescence. And I am sure this can hardly be solved by some electronic devices.
I would like to recommend the free NAAFA Child Advocacy ToolkitSM (CATK) and other written guidelines/resources to assist you looking at programs.
A Yale Rudd Center report reviewed existing research on weight stigma in children and adolescents, with attention to the nature and extent of weight bias toward obese youths and to the primary sources of stigma in their lives, including peers, educators, and parents. As a result of weight bias and discrimination, obese children suffer psychological, social, and health-related consequences. http://www.yaleruddcenter.org/resources/upload/docs/what/bias/StigmaObesityChildrensHealth.pdf
Rebecca Puhl of the Rudd Center further brings to light the stigmatization of large children in the following article.
http://www.obesityaction.org/magazine/oacnews7/Childhood%20Obesity%20and%20Stigma.pdf
The NAAFA Child Advocacy Toolkit shows how Health At Every Size® takes the focus off weight and directs it to healthful eating and enjoyable movement. It addresses the bullying, building positive self-image and eliminating stigmatization of large children. The CATK lists resources available to parents, educators or caregivers for educational materials, curriculum and programming that is beneficial for all children. It can be found at:
http://issuu.com/naafa/docs/naafa_childadvocacy2011combined_v04?viewMode=magazine&mode=embed
[...] Schools to Monitor Obese Students, Raising Privacy Fears (educationnews.org) As a Long Island district uses electronic monitors to keep track of the physical activity of obese students; critics call it an invasion of privacy [...]
Do you really want the government trying to help your kids? Do you think they will do a good job? Do they do a good job at anything else, except robbing us blind? Get the schools out of our family lives! They are not our parents! They are not our policeman! We do not pay their salary for them to treat us like slaves! The more we go into debt, the more we lose our freedom! Legalize the Constitution, it is being shredded!
Im using this article to debate dietary guide lines for pro! thankss(:
well rnt u something
and this is basically all con?
guidelines************** its one word