Those heavy school bags
There is a silent scourge we have right now affecting our school children: heavy school bags. It is largely unrecognized because it affects our children in subtle ways, five days a week, nine months a year, for around 12 years while their bones and muscles are still in the early stages of development.
Thankfully, in a resolution adopted last week, the Cebu Provincial Board has urged educators to find ways to reduce the weight of school bags carried by schoolchildren, according to a report in The FREEMAN yesterday.
Provincial Board member Raul Bacaltos, author of the resolution, has observed that it has become a common sight in most public and private elementary schools for children to be lugging heavy school bags.
Back in the old days, old folks would often regale us with past accounts of their long and tough daily hike to school. At least while it was a tough experience for them, it was something that strengthened their body, encouraged their curiosity with nature, and nourished them with fruits and wild cherries along their path.
In the future, schoolchildren of today will tell their children about their overweight school bags of yore – a sad tale of muscle strain, spinal distortion, stunted growth, back pain, and short attention spans, which are commonly-recognized effects of carrying heavy school bags.
House Bill 6644, or a proposed law to limit the weight of bags carried by schoolchildren, had actually been introduced in 2010 by Angeles City Representative Carmelo Lazatin. Senator Lito Lapid followed suit in 2013 with Senate Bill No. 237.
Senator Lapid’s bill fixed the ideal bag weight to be not more than 15 percent of a child’s body weight. Gauge that with the results of a random weighing of school bags that Representative Lazatin had cited which showed that pupils carry school bags weighing as much as 50 percent of their body weight.
Unfortunately, both bills failed to pass into law. Either the problem the bills were trying to solve was deemed not that important, or there are practical concerns on the ground that must be considered and this process ran out of time.
Yet it does not change the fact that the safe weight of backpacks, for example, to be carried by students according to a study published in the Alexandria Engineering Journal is just around 2.87 kg for male students and 2.53 kg for female students (Ismaila, 2017). The same study noted that children and adolescents who currently experience low back pain from external stressors will expect to continue to have this pain as adults. Another study pegged the safe weight of backpacks for all school levels to be not over 10 percent of body weight (de Paula, 2015).
But while there is a need for regulation on this matter, the same may not work best if we do not consider the practical factors on the ground, foremost of which is how to reduce the number of books and notebooks students carry.
Some schools can provide lockers or storage facilities while other schools cannot afford such. Homework timetables can also be adjusted so that students don’t have to bring most of their books with them back home. Electronic gadgets, cloud apps, and other online solutions are also available, but which may also pose a health risk for smaller children.
As always, the challenges are there, but that is why God has gifted us with a brain that is larger than our mouth. We can and should do something about those heavy school bags.
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