Backpack debate: Pupils shoulder heavy load > 영어토론방

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By Anne Danahy
adanahy@centredaily.com

All students might not carry back-breaking book bags, but their packs don't usually qualify as featherweights, either.

Health-care providers are hoping to raise awareness about that and encourage pupils, parents and schools to find ways to lighten the load to no more than 15 percent of a child's body weight.

"When I have to carry a lot of books, it gets really heavy. My binder keeps growing and growing," said Ali Laubscher, 12, a seventh-grader at the Bellefonte Area Middle School.

Ali's backpack weighed in at about 20 pounds, about 23.5 percent of her body weight. That put it on the upper end of an unscientific sample of elementary and middle school students' backpacks conducted by the Centre Daily Times.

That sample included a half dozen fourth- and fifth-graders from Benner Elementary and 11 students from the middle school. The elementary students were weighed on a nurse's scale and middle schoolers were weighed on the type of scale you'd typically use at home.

The lightest backpack weighed in at three pounds and the heaviest load -- which included a trumpet in a separate case -- totaled 22 pounds.

Michele Bailey-Fenush, an occupational therapist at HealthSouth in Pleasant Gap, said elementary school students don't usually overpack, but middle school students do.

Bailey-Fenush conducted her own backpack weigh-ins as part of the American Occupational Therapy Association's second annual Backpack Safety Awareness Day in September.

She said the goal is to educate parents and teachers about the dangers of bulky bags and to share suggestions with them on how to make the load more manageable, such as packing heavy items closer to the child's back.

In 2000, emergency rooms handled an estimated 6,512 backpack related injuries, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. That is up from an estimated 2,898 in 1994.

"Back pain in children is not so uncommon anymore," Dr. John Purvis, pediatric orthopaedic surgeon, said in an American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons news release. "Orthopaedic surgeons nationwide have seen an increase in children visiting their offices complaining of back and shoulder pain."

Although there isn't consensus that backpacks are the culprit, there is agreement that extra steps are worth taking, according to the news release.

Seventh-grader Kaitlyn Gephart, 12, had a backpack that checked in at 12 pounds. She said that was with only one book -- social studies -- but her math book was even heavier.

"I walk home from school, and sometimes it's pretty heavy. But I'll live with it," Gephart said.

So blame it on the math books. Or maybe it's those big binders.

At Benner Elementary, Principal Connie Puckett suggested weighing a math book by itself. Fourth-grader Meagan Witter's was 4 pounds.

Bailey-Fenush said one suggestion is photocopying out of textbooks when only a few pages are needed for homework, rather than taking the whole book home.

Bailey-Fenush said the backpack campaign is just in its second year, and she thinks alertness to the issue will grow with time.

Parents and students already seem to have some awareness of the problem. Some Bellefonte elementary and middle school students had extra thick straps on their backpacks and others used backpacks with wheels and pull-out handles. Most carried their backpacks on both shoulders, instead of slung over one shoulder.

"Yeah," Laubscher said of her heavy-duty shoulder straps. "They don't break as easy."

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