influence health. Because of her expertise, the Williams- burg Community Health Foundation officials sought her out for the steering committee that initiated SHIP. The relationship has blossomed, with the Schroeder Center and William & Mary students involved in pivotal aspects of the program’s setup and evaluation along the way. “When a lot of the numbers about the rise in
childhood obesity were just coming out, many school districts were scrambling to create wellness programs,” Mellor says. This was around 2005, just after Congress mandated that all school districts receiving national school lunch program funds develop “school wellness policies,” or locally based plans to promote better nutri- tion and more physical activity through schools. “Williamsburg–James City County was ahead of the
curve,” Mellor continues. “In addition to well-thought-out programs and policies, they directed significant financial and personnel resources to tackle the problem — some- thing most school districts around the nation have been unable to do.” How serious is childhood obesity? According to a May
2010 report issued by the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity, one in every three youngsters in the United States ages 2 to 19 is overweight or obese. That trend is mirrored both within Virginia and within the Williamsburg area, data have shown. The 2007 National Survey of Children’s Health found that 31 percent of Virginia’s youth ages 10 to 17 were overweight or obese. And in Williamsburg, 2006 data compiled in part by the Schroeder Center as a baseline measure for SHIP showed more than a third of students were overweight. “That’s a huge percentage,” remarks Denise Corbett,
SHIP’s coordinator. The finding also underscored the critical need for such a program locally, she says. School nurses were becoming alarmed by the number of students with serious health problems such as asthma and diabetes, according to Corbett. “They were seeing kids at the third-grade level who were morbidly obese,” she says. Obesity generally is defined as a person having
excess weight for his or her height, as measured by BMI. In children, tables formulated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that compare BMI among children of the same age and gender are used to obtain
a percentile ranking. A child is considered overweight if he or she ranks between the 85th and 95th percentile and obese if ranking above the 95th percentile. “The rise of childhood obesity is pretty striking,”
Mellor says. “It has more than tripled in the past 30 years. That’s the concern that everybody’s motivated by, because childhood obesity is linked to diabetes among kids, asthma, possibly to cardiovascular problems, lost school days, additional health care spending, and obesity in adulthood. “You are more likely to be obese as an adult if you
were obese as a child,” Mellor continues. “So kids who are obese today potentially are looking at a whole lifetime of health problems such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, and adult onset diabetes.”
FEATURES / President’s Report 2010 / The College of William & Mary 43
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