By Tom Bogdon
America has seen the “Lost Generation” of disoriented youth following World War I, the “Beat Generation” of would-be poets in the 1950s , and the “Baby Boom” generation that began to grow up in the 1960s. But we now have, for the first time, a generation whose distinguishing characteristic is its waistline—“Generation XL.”
At least that is the name given by public television station KCPT to today’s generation of children and young adults who are perhaps the most overfed and undernourished in history. The high rate of obesity among this wave of young people is aggravated by the decreased emphasis in schools on Physical Education, even the disappearance of recess from many elementary schools.
Produced by Nick Haines, executive producer of public affairs for KCPT, the year-long series of programs is one of the most intensive series of its type ever undertaken by a public television station in this country, comparable to Philadelphia station WHYY’s look at the Alzheimer’s epidemic a few years ago.
The series, underwritten by Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Kansas City, pokes around in the halls of government and elementary and high schools, where food service can even be a major revenue source thanks to the largesse of Coke and Pepsi, which pay millions of dollars for exclusive rights to vend their beverage products along with snack food.
Proving that schools can be as secretive as industry when it comes to multi-million-dollar food-service operations, the Shawnee-Mission and Blue Valley School districts in Johnson County declined to participate in the “Generation XL” project, which is just past the mid-point, although many others have, including Olathe, Independence, North Kansas City and the Kansas City Missouri School District.
“One program examined the huge increase in food rewards and incentives being provided to area kids,” Haines said this week in an interview. “Almost all the examples we use in this project come from experiences I have had with my own four children and their own schools (in the Blue Valley District).
“My 10-year-old writes a great essay, and he gets a gift certificate from his teacher for two Krispy Kreme donuts,” Haines noted. “My eight-year-old boy wins the school’s Artist of the Month contest and gets his work displayed at a local McDonald’s and a gift certificate for a free ‘Happy Meal.’
“If my seven-year-old behaves well in class, at the end of the day she gets to pick a piece of candy from a large basket on the teachers’ desk,” Haines continued. “Add to that two or three birthday parties and the requisite cupcakes that are brought in by parents, and our kids are basically getting sugar all day long.”
Generation XL began its examination of the federal school lunch program with findings by military recruiters during World War II that many enlistees and draftees into the Armed Services were weak and undernourished and therefore ineligible for military service. These findings led President Harry S. Truman and Congress to establish the National School Lunch Program in 1946.
But about a decade ago, the other side of the coin began to become evident in American life. Haines notes that there was a growing consensus that expanding waistlines of kids were becoming a major issue.
“I’ve been interested in what schools can do about obesity in the last seven years,” Haines said. “We’ve tried to do programs on this issue, but it takes a lot of time to do the job properly, particularly if you want to go beyond the superficial and dig for answers.
“About 18 months ago Blue Cross/Blue Shield initiated a project in Kansas City in which they were experimenting with putting Physical Education daily in some schools and trying to get kids to think differently about exercise,” Haines continued. “What started as a documentary that would tell the story of one school developed into a year-long project that would hit at all the challenges and obstacles facing kids in leading healthy lives.
“What was the point of dealing with physical education as long as you have junk food in your vending machines and serve big bags of Cheetos and high-fat French fries in the school cafeteria?” Haines asked.
“It was a campaign, really,” Haines concluded. “What it became is a year-long look at the issue. I can’t remember any other issue we’ve spent a year looking at.”
Haines said he wanted the project to benefit from the wisdom and experience of as many people as possible.
“I did not want the program to look like one of our panel discussions, with so-called ‘experts’ who have all the answers,” Haines noted.
The fourth part in the series concentrates on high school students themselves, and is being edited down from a two-hour session with 13 representative youths from public and private high schools from across the metropolitan area. Nick Haines led the discussion.
“In the teen panel it was so important that we not have just goody two-shoes kids,” Haines said. “They had to be authentic and representative of real young people. I think we got a terrific cross-section of urban and suburban kids, boys and girls, and we even had people on the panel who had really struggled with their weight.”
Haines added that by and large the media doesn’t take risks with guests, preferring great communicators who are pithy and concise. But, he said, that’s not a reflection of America or our community.
“So we decided to bring as many as we can together, tape long and then edit down the content to provide the most compelling discussion,” Haines said. “That will become an hour-long program with lots of audio.
“The whole goal of the program was to come to grips with what are the biggest obstacles to young people eating healthy and being more physically active,” Haines continued. “My job was to prod and poke at their answers, to try and get them to come up with solutions they think might work.
“Remember, it’s middle-aged politicians, educators and health policy experts who are the ones coming up with the fixes of the problem,” Haines said. “Unless they really understand the motivation and challenges of young people themselves, those solutions are doomed to failure.”
This program, scheduled to air Thursday, Sept. 18, at 8 p.m. is entitled: “Generation XL: The Kids Speak Out.”
The first installment of the series was entitled “The Rise and Fall of P.E. in Schools.” Haines described it this way:
“On that program we had P.E. teachers, Republican and Democratic lawmakers from both sides of State Line, the superintendents of the Kansas City Missouri and Hickman Mills School Districts, the assistant superintendent of the Olathe School District, health policy experts and lobbyists for school board associations in Kansas and Missouri who have led efforts to quash any new legislation that would impose greater physical education requirements on schools.,” Haines said.
Asked what the program had accomplished, Haines said: “For me, that show particularly showed first of all this is not puff journalism where we all sit around, have a group hug, and say, ‘Aren’t we wonderful?’
“There were a lot of ideological clashes and tension in the conversation, because rarely do advocates and critics of a public policy change ever sit down in a room together to discuss their differences, never for two hours,” Haines said.
Haines said that in the elementary grades, as schools become so concerned about fulfilling the requirements of No Child Left Behind, a third of schools no longer provide recess for Kindergarten through 5th Grade.
“It’s something parents and grandparents are concerned about that their kids are not being active in the course of the day,” Haines said. “And, increasingly, academic studies are showing that the more physically active a child is, the better his or her ability to digest math, reading and writing skills.”
The second episode of Generation XL series was entitled “The Food Fight in the School Cafeteria.”
“On that panel, we had school cafeteria operators from a wide range of school districts, we had nutrition experts and some alarmed parents,” Haines said.
“This program picked apart the kind of food kids are eating in today’s schools, and by and large the picture wasn’t pretty,” Haines said. “The program was really an educational exercise because even those of us who have children currently in school really have no clue about how the system works and operates.”
Haines said he thought it was amazing to many viewers that schools have only about 80 cents to spend on each kid’s meal (after labor and overhead) and that school cafeterias have to be totally self-supporting, which means that sales of chips, snack cakes, candy bars and sugary drinks help keep the food-service program afloat.
“It was also jaw-dropping to some of our viewers that given all of the state and federal regulations on school lunches, there’s only a small handful of food items that can’t be sold,” Haines said. “Some schools are trying to make a difference by eliminating the junk food and serving fresh vegetables and fruit in nutritious and low-fat meals.
“But they come at a cost,” Haines continued. “One project we highlighted cost kids and their parents $4 a day. Others scoffed that parents would never be willing to pay that in their schools.”
Asked about the federal government’s involvement in school lunches, Haines said: “The current federal guidelines governing the school lunch program haven’t changed in 30 years. So there are minimum calorie requirements for food, but no caps. There’s no cap on the amount of fat in a food item served to your child, no cap on the amount of sugar in a food item or drink.
“The Feds don’t even set any requirements on the amount of salt that can be in the food, even though we now know too much sodium can be a critical health risk.
“For the last three years, Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin has introduced legislation in Congress that would require more stringent guidelines on school food,” Haines noted. “It has gone nowhere.”
The third part of the series was entitled, “The Battle Over School Vending Machines,” in which has a huge economic dimension.
“This involves multi-million-dollar soda contracts,” Haines said. “These have made it easy for schools to say yes to vending machines. So on this program, we had the superintendent of the Independence School District, which gave up their big soda contract and took over the vending machines themselves. They’re filling the machines with healthier choices and argue they’re making more money than they did before.”
After Generation XL: The Kids Speak Out airs on KCPT on Sept 18, Haines and the public TV station will sum up the series with a final program entitled, “Who Should Fix This?”
According to Haines, this segment, “Basically looks at the broader community’s role in tackling obesity. We’ll be featuring housing developers who are creating neighborhoods so difficult to navigate that kids can’t walk or bike to school.
“We’ll be featuring business leaders and the clergy including a black inner-city minister who says the church needs to take a more aggressive role, and is using his pulpit to speak out.”
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