We are the New York City Strategic Alliance for Health and we aim to make children’s lives more active throughout New York City. But how do you change the pulse of a whole city? We’ve learned to start with giving props to a lot of local moves- and marshaling a lot of local commitment.

A salsa dance here, a slap shot there, and after a while the foundations start rumbling. Where the structures resettle, we hope, children will see clearer paths to living healthy in whatever part of the city includes school and home. We see these little changes as accretive, meaning they add up and eventually to tip the systems in new permanent directions. We had thought we could first mobilize parents around the city to unite and demand more physical education in school. We now see a deeper way to unite.
Giving up is not an option. Getting bogged down is a risk. So we start the conversation by giving praise to communities in schools who unify to rewrite the system their kids move through each day.

We pledge to unite parents, professionals and school staff to figure out a way to get at least two sessions of physical education each week for every child in New York City public schools. We’ve tried a few means of pursuing this goal and we’ve learned to start where hundreds of dedicated parents and teachers have started.  Together, in a school. We’ve learned that work for system-wide change becomes dilute for good reasons, but that is no good reason to let the childhood obesity epidemic persist. For three years we have seen and learned  how school communities craft new designs to add physical education. And we learned that they increase effort when we celebrate those partnerships with our Excellence in School Wellness award.

So we’re returning that award this year, hoping more schools will apply. Now we’ve learned that award winners use a range of approaches. When you add them up, you get the base for a citywide goal.Our partners at the NYC Department of Education  know that each child’s physical learning tacks to each child’s overall learning: when a young person feels she owns something, she does it more often and learns it more richly. So they encourage schools to empower kids to find the sports they’ll love- whether those entail teams or tees, jump ropes or jump shots. They know that kinetic learning pays off when kids learn to collaborate, to play different roles at different times, and to cherish practicing so well that competing comes to seem like a form of practicing.

They also know that a clutch of forces keeps basic physical education too marginal to too many kids’ lives. Schedules, once set, cling together like spaghetti and steel wool. Standardized tests overshadow the sometimes zigzags we take to teach and learn. Facilities age and there’s less money than demand for upgrading spaces to fit a 21st-Century school’s needs.  What gets selected- among gardens, cooking, computers, arts- inevitably squeezes something else.

So we wanted to sound the alarm that schools in too many places offer too little physical education time to truly train kids for success. But the citywide organizing is still coming together. Demanding more physical education in public schools turns out to be a job at which kids who get modern phys-ed could probably shine. It takes  a clear read on a common goal, and a coach who can guide participants to learn from a range of intelligences. And it requires each member of a coalition to use several intelligences, switching one on and the other off, as goals gain definition. We will achieve this team synthesis. It’ll take time.

Yet our kids don’t have time. Neither do our teachers or parents- who are all moving immediately to create new ways to teach and celebrate physical activity. As they succeed, more models will sharpen and more lucky families will see the impact of phys-ed benefits.  So the Excellence in School Wellness cohort schools form both innovation labs advance teams- they are showing in their ways how schoolchildren can find physical education in today’s landscape. And they are showing how much company they need.

We raise them up even as we hunker down for the next stage in citywide discussions. We know that professionals, advocates, teachers, parents, school leaders, medical personnel and City Hallall share a goal. We know that playing as a team takes time and error, faith and review.

We’re in this for a long time. We want everyone to join our team, beginning with a cheer.