Mar 11, 2009 7:25 pm US/Central
Teach A Healthy Body, Get A Healthy Mind
EL PASO, Texas (CBS News) ―
Over the last year, El Paso eighth grader Valerie Gomez has grown five inches and dropped 25 pounds - quite a change from when CBS News correspondent Cynthia Bowers first met her 18 months ago.
"I really feel that there's a girl behind a big huge girl that I would like to show everybody else," Valerie said a year ago.
"Last time we talked, you said there was a different girl waiting to come out," Bowers said. "Is she coming out?"
"Yes, she is, she is," Valerie answered. "I think she is. She's not really here, not like all of her, but she's coming out."
Valerie is part of "the fitnessgram," a Texas experiment that mandates daily physical education and annual fitness tests for the state's 2.4 million kids ages 8 to 18.
"Now that they have those standards, it's like a wake-up call for them," said George Nunez, a P.E. teacher. "That gives them an incentive to push."
The idea was proposed in part to help combat the state's troubling childhood obesity rates, but this first-of its-kind study also set out to prove physically fit kids make for better students - and the results are in.
After just one year officials say Texas school kids are performing better on standardized tests. And as fitness rates rose, absentee rates dropped, and so did reports of discipline problems.
And there is a direct correlation between more cardiovascular activity and better grades. At the top performing schools - where at least 90 percent of the kids pass the state assessments tests - 80 percent of the students are fit. And at the poorest performing schools? Only 40 percent make the fitness grade.
Valerie said that it has changed her life.
"Like last year I got tested and I saw that I did bad, and then I did it this year and I saw that I could do twice as much as I did last year," she said. "It really brought a smile to my face."
Texas officials are smiling too, but they're not done yet. They believe the harder they can push the kids to become more physically fit, the harder the kids will push themselves in the classroom.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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