NEWSHEALTH EDUCATION

This guest post comes from Darell Hammond, CEO of KaBOOM!, a national nonprofit dedicated to saving play for America's children.

This week, our Congress will be returning from their August recess--a yearly tradition that recognizes the human need to take a break from a grueling schedule and spend some time playing.

At the same time, as children across the country return to school, some will find that they have no recess at all. Others will find that their combined recess and lunch period is so short, they have to choose between food and play.

Play is under attack in our nation's schools--and shrinking recess periods are only part of the problem. Homework is increasing. Cities are building new schools without playgrounds. Safety concerns are prompting bans of tag, soccer, and even running on the schoolyard.

Despite countless studies proving that play is integral to children's learning and health, most kids aren't getting enough space and time to play during the school day. These seven absurd stories from last school year say it all:

Jeff Short is a high school baseball coach now, but he used to be just another teenage ball player, dreaming of the Major Leagues. So he knows what his players are thinking when they watch their favorite players.

"When you look at a Major League dugout, and you see these players with tobacco," Short said, "First thing you think of - oh that's cool. Oh, I can do that."

A coalition of public health groups, including the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and Smoke Free Texas, are trying to stop this cycle. They've started a petition on Change.org, trying to get Major League Baseball to ban smokeless tobacco, just like they did a few years ago in the minor leagues.

Conspiracy theories: they just don't die. Long after creepy anti-vaccine "doctor" Andrew Wakefield lost his medical license - and had his study retracted - there's still a vocal anti-vaccine movement, peddling the theory that vaccinating children for deadly diseases causes autism.

Medical journal Pediatrics thoroughly discredited Wakefield's claim last year with a definitive study showing no connection between prenatal and early-childhood exposure to thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative, and autism. Not convinced? Check out loads of other studies debunking the "vaccines cause autism" myth here.

So why would Professor John W. Oller, Jr. - a tenured professor at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette - keep telling these anti-vaccine horror stories? Despite the fact that Wakefield's medical license was revoked and his claim was retracted, Oller continues to spread fear on his blog, while flaunting his ULL credentials.

On Sunday, Sierra Krizman felt perfectly fine.

On Monday, she fell ill. On Tuesday, April 10, 2007, 20-year-old Krizman died from bacterial meningitis, an inflammation of the membranes that cover the brain and spinal cord.

Krizman was a Colorado college student who died without benefiting from a vaccine that can reduce the risk of contracting this deadly disease. Usually caused by a viral or bacterial infection, meningitis can result in brain damage, hearing loss, or learning disabilities, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

When her family shared her story at a school assembly in Casper, Wyoming, teacher Susan Griffith's social studies students were horrified. The disease disproportionately affects youth and college students. When Griffith suggested the class write a vaccination bill as a class project, they took her up on it. Their work paid off: Today, it was introduced in the state legislature.

15 states mandate meningitis vaccination for college freshmen, but Wyoming's not one of them. The bill Griffith's students came up with would vaccinate all Wyoming 11 and 12-year-olds (which would cost $574,000 a year) and possibly all children 13-18 during the first year (bringing the total initial cost to $2.3 million).

Does Lorillard, Inc. ring a bell? This parent company of Newport cigarettes just got clobbered with a $71 million verdict for seducing a 9-year-old into tobacco addiction in the 1960s. Targeting poor, African-American kids in Boston with a constant stream of free cigarettes, Lorillard nabbed an entire generation of smokers while vigorously denying that smoking was dangerous. Marie Evans, who died of lung cancer before her family won the verdict, testified that she traded the cigarettes for candy before becoming addicted herself. Tragic.

With their detestable track record around children, you'd think that Lorillard would be the last company respected parenting magazines Family Circle and Parents would want as advertising clients. But as Change.org Health Editor Brie Cadman wrote this week, the magazines routinely accept ads from the tobacco behemoth, masked as anti-smoking literature.

The "Real Parents. Real Answers." campaign from Lorillard links to a misleading website that puts all of the responsibility for stopping smoking on parents and kids themselves. Hey, parents! Little Johnny's lighting up in order to "look cool," "experiment" or to "look older," one of the pages of Lorillard's website reads. Not, of course, because he's addicted to tobacco laced with a myriad of toxic chemicals, sold to him by none other than Lorillard, Inc.

Welcome to nutrition class, kids! Today we're going to be learning about how processed cheese, factory-farmed beef and iceberg lettuce fit into a healthy diet. No farmer's market field trip today, everyone. Where are we going? McDonald's!

This one belongs in the "Hell is freezing over" files. Change.org Health Editor Brie Cadman reports that a McDonald's in Stratford, Connecticut recently hosted a nutrition workshop for sixth-graders, where they learned, among other things, to choose a Big Mac because it has 210 fewer calories than an Angus Deluxe.

That's just what the U.S. food guide pyramid says, right? French Fries on the top, Angus Deluxes in the middle, Big Macs on the bottom. Wait, no, that's... the absolute worst model of nutrition that you could teach a small child.

Cadman goes on to relate that this field trip is a marketing ploy by a McDonald's publicist who was giving kids "tips on making healthy choices."

For many busy families, fast food offers a quick, easy way to feed picky kids while remaining sane. McDonald's does indeed offer veggies, apple slices and salads that may (depending on how much salad dressing you use) fit into a healthy diet. Big Macs, however, contain almost half of an adult's daily recommended amount of sodium and fat. A McDonald's marketing campaign masquerading as a children's nutrition program isn't just dishonest, it's dangerous.

Marching band practice can be a killer. The sweaty uniforms, the knife-sharp turns, the... toxic fumes covering the field because of natural gas drilling? Kelly Gant of Texas had to pull her daughter out of marching band practice for that very reason, the Environmental Working Group reports. Kelly Gant told her local paper that her daughter felt dizzy, jittery, headache-y and unable to concentrate after band practice on school grounds. Why? Her school district, and other districts in Texas, are allowing energy companies to drill for natural gas on school property.

Here's the backstory: a geological region in Texas called the Barnett shale formation is full of valuable natural gas. Landowners -- including schools -- that sit on top of the gas are being offered massive amounts of money in exchange for drilling rights. Change.org Environment Editor Jess Leber explains that the Argyle school district has received more than half a million dollars -- $680,681.25 -- for allowing Hillwood and Williams Production to drill exploratory gas wells around Argyle High School.

Drilling, schmilling. What's a few headaches and some coughing when it means a big chunk of change for struggling school districts, right? Wrong. Natural gas production in North Texas has been linked to toxic emissions of benzene, toluene and formaldehyde.

It's the year 2010, and humans have done some pretty incredible things. We've built the Great Wall of China and the Pyramids of Egypt. We've dug deep into the Earth and set foot on the Moon. In America, we've even passed health care reform. (Ba-dum-ching.)

What haven't we done? Built toilets and sanitation systems for the 1.2 billion people who have to pee and poop in the open, polluting drinking water and spreading disease. In terms of saving the world, solving the world's water crisis would be a real gamechanger, says David Trouba of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council.

"Solving the sanitation crisis would be a more momentous accomplishment for humanity than the building of the Great Wall, the Apollo Moon Missions or the construction of the Pyramids," he said recently.

If you're glued to your TV screen on Tuesday nights for FOX's Glee, you've already met the new football coach at McKinley High: Shannon Beiste (pronounced "Beast"), the burly, lipstick-toting taskmaster who's pledged to whip the struggling team into shape. Gym teacher Sue Sylvester plots the demise of the glee club while coaching the cheerleading squad. McKinley's former football coach, Ken Tanaka, is a dim-witted jock who pulled his socks to his knees while cluelessly pursuing the school guidance counselor.

What do these coaches have in common? Besides questionable fashion sense, they're all known as sports buffs, not educators -- and they feed into our national stereotype of "dumb jock" gym teachers.

Sure, this is Glee, where nobody spends much time in class and teachers are liable to break out into song. But the "sports vs. school" story plays out nationally as well. On a recent episode of The View, New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein took a swing at physical education teachers, implying that they shouldn't be paid as much as "real" teachers. “Math and science teachers receive the same pay as physical educators,” Klein said in a conversation about merit pay, as evidence for the need for higher pay for different types of teachers.

How do you get a kid to choose fresh veggies over a bag of grease-soaked French fries? Some might say a lobotomy, but in Iowa, there's a better answer. Iowa schools are taking the lead in the local-food movement, steering students into fields, greenhouses and even onto the farm. And guess what? In many of these programs, kids are eating what they grow. 

The innovations in Iowa are redefining the phrase "school lunch." Malcolm Price Laboratory School in Cedar Falls - a 369-student, K-12 school on the campus of the University of Northern Iowa - dishes up breakfast and lunch made of fresh, organic produce from local farms. All students from kindergarten to 10th grade participate in daily exercise, while 11th and 12th graders develop their own, individually-powered fitness program.

In Independence, Iowa, East Elementary School turns old bleachers into raised-bed gardens, where students grow tomatoes, cucumbers and cabbage, stomping on grubs, watering their plants and eating their own harvests.

Take it from East Elementary first-grade teacher Micki Sand-Cohen: Plopping some vegetables down in front of kids swimming in a sea of super-sized Twinkies won't work. 

"A lot of people are like, 'School garden, big deal,'" she told the Associated Press. "But if they could only see the way kids react. These kids wouldn't touch vegetables in the lunch line. But if kids are involved in growing the vegetables, they're much more likely to eat them."