Walking school buses that walk kids to class, schoolyard vegetable gardens and cooking and aerobics lessons are on Chicago's track to trim childhood obesity.

In Chicago’s black and Hispanic neighborhoods, parents, schools and community leaders are making small changes that could add up to a big improvement in children’s health.

“The Latino and African-American communities across the nation are in a state of epidemic,” said Guillermo Gomez, father of a Chicago public school student and the Chicago director for the Healthy Schools Campaign, a children’s health advocacy group.

“You can’t put it any other way. There’s an epidemic in these communities in the area of obesity and health disparity. Once parents understand that, there’s no other way but to come out and help and to try to make a difference.”

Overweight children have a higher risk of developing diabetes and heart disease, among other health complications.

But two out of every three children in Chicago’s minority neighborhoods are overweight or obese – a number that far surpasses already disturbing national averages, according to a 2004 study by the Sinai Urban Health Institute.

The study found that more than 50 percent of children who live in the predominantly black neighborhoods of North Lawndale and Roseland are obese. Close to 50 percent of children are obese in Humboldt Park and West Town, two neighborhoods with large Hispanic populations.

These startling statistics appear at a time when many public schools in these neighborhoods and throughout Chicago have eliminated recess and physical education from the school day because of budget shortages or a push to focus more time on improving test scores.

“Having recess or physical education is at the discretion of each school’s principal,” said Denise Murphy-Stroud, the physical education curriculum manager for CPS who is developing programs that train teachers to incorporate physical activity into regular classrooms.

The Chicago Board of Education adopted a Local School Wellness Policy in August that is designed to encourage schools to promote nutrition and physical activity, though it leaves the specifics up to each school.

Groups such as the Healthy Schools Campaign and the Consortium to Lower Obesity in Chicago Children are partnering with community-based organizations to develop the kind of specialized in-school and out-of-school physical education and nutrition programs that they hope will work for each neighborhood.

The groups hired networkers – people who live and work in the communities – to help shape the programs.

“What we’ve seen is that it gives us access and information because Chicago is such a community of neighborhoods,” said Liz Wuerfell, a project coordinator for consortium. “Resources in one neighborhood will be incredibly different than resources in another.”

Wuerffel oversees Transportation that is Active and Safe for Kids (TASK), a group within the consortium that aims to foster safe walking and biking in Uptown, Edgewater, West Town, East Humboldt Park, West Garfield Park and Ashburn.

“We focused really on the trip to and from school, because that’s a tangible daily activity that will increase [the kids’] ability to have more activity," she said.

After surveying the communities, Wuerffel found that most parents agreed that traffic and gang violence were the two major problems preventing children from walking to school.

Each of the communities suggested forming a walking school bus, where a parent volunteers to pick kids up at home or at designated locations along a walking route to school.

“It not only encourages kids to walk – it gives them a safe route to do that,” Wuerffel explained.

While a version of a walking school bus in Logan Square has met with success, responses have been varied in the neighborhoods TASK has targeted.

At Goudy Elementary, a public school in Uptown, the walking school bus was running for most of the fall semester but dropped off toward winter break and hasn’t resumed for the spring.

TASK leaders said they are trying to evaluate whether the cold winter weather was a factor in the drop-off or if there are deeper reasons.

“One of the things we find limits our success in doing this is that parent involvement in schools in Chicago has been on the decline,” Wuerffel said, citing conversations with teachers and principals who have asserted as much.

“I don’t know why, but I have my ideas – maybe they’re working three part time jobs. Whatever the reason is, they’re not there enough to support an initiative like this.”

Schools also require parents who lead walking school buses to submit to fingerprinting and background checks, which Wuerffel believes may discourage undocumented immigrants from participating.

Gomez, who works primarily with Hispanic neighborhoods, said strategies to tackle childhood obesity are gathering steam.

“Progress in this area is going to be slow, but principals and parents are very interested in making a change.”

Eighty people attended a breakfast that Gomez helped organize to allow parents and administrators to meet with principals from Chicago schools that have enacted successful health programs, such as the ones at Mitchell Elementary in West Town and McAuliffe Elementary in Logan Square.

“Some schools have implemented salad bars, some have reinstated recess,” said Gomez, who explained that the breakfast was intended to establish a dialogue between parents and principals and to foster idea-sharing.

Seven hundred people attended a Healthy Schools Campaign rally for school wellness last spring and 300 parents presented signed postcards to the Chicago Public Schools board, calling for the wellness policy that was eventually adopted in August.

But convincing the Hispanic community that childhood obesity is a serious concern was challenging at first, according to organizers from the Healthy Schools Campaign.

“What we found is, to some extent, parents were hearing from the dominant culture that their kids were fat and needed to lose weight,” said Rochelle Davis, executive director for HSC. “They thought that this was just other way the dominant culture was telling them what was pretty and what wasn’t. We tried to turn it around and make it about disparity and health.”

The strategy seems to have worked. Most of the campaign's program ideas now come from within the communities.

“We have a very, very strong coordinating community of parents who plan these events,” Davis said.

In the predominantly Hispanic Little Village community, the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization worked with an area elementary school to help it become the first school in Illinois to measure children for obesity.

The organization, with a membership of mostly community parents, has taken an active role in promoting healthy activities for community youth.

Jovita Flores is a leader in the organization who took nutrition classes in college and has three children in public schools. She teaches cooking classes to parents who want to learn how to make healthier versions of their favorite recipes.

She usually sees a turnout of 8-12 parents in each of her classes, which she holds three times a week.

“Parents bring ideas and recipes and they share,” said Flores, who is in the process of assembling a cook book with the recipes that they have compiled so far.

Flores has also organized community walks and events that bring parents and children to grocery stores to learn how to interpret the nutritional information on food labels.

An aerobics class for parents and kids held at a local school, which used to draw about five parents, is growing, little by little, Flores said.

“Now almost all of the schools in the neighborhood have aerobics classes, with 20-40 parents participating.”

Three low-income Chicago schools are getting a little help from Chicago chef and caterer Greg Christian. Christian started the Organic School Project to bring nutrition education and healthy food to public schools.

In addition to monthly health classes taught by Loyola University School of Nursing dieticians, Christian had the kids plant a vegetable garden at Louis May Alcott School in Lincoln Park last year.

“They have to reconnect with Mother Earth – they’re so disconnected,” Christian said. “You’ve got to put them in a garden, have their feet touch the earth.”

As part of the program, the children draw pictures or perform raps and songs to express how they feel about what they are learning.

“You should see the art projects around the garden. You’d cry,” Christian said. “They’re starving for [health programs], that’s what people don’t realize. There’s no recess, there’s no gym, and they eat lunch in 20 minutes.”

Christian plans to introduce gardens into the other two pilot schools, McCorkle Elementary and Hammond Elementary, next year.

In the meantime, he wrangled enough financial backing to begin an organic feeding program at Alcott that is scheduled to begin on April 19th. OSC will work with the cafeteria to cook daily breakfasts and lunches from scratch, using only organic or locally-grown fresh foods, or vegetables from the school garden.

Christian will introduce the program into Hammond in September and McCorkle next January.

Christian said that he initially approached 35 schools with the Organic School Project, but only the principals at Alcott, Hammond and McCorkle were receptive.

“They didn’t get it,” he said about the administrators at the other schools. “They were thinking: How is this going to help my reading scores? How is this going to help my math scores?”

Gomez said that while parents and administrators have been working together in many neighborhoods, the biggest challenge parents face is spreading the word - there is now a mandated school wellness policy in Chicago and it is in the schools’ best interest to participate in it.

“If you have healthy students, you increase their academic performance,” Gomez said. “Healthy kids miss less school days.”

“We are trying to create awareness, we are getting people involved – not only the administrators, but CPS and so forth,” Gomez said. “Things do not happen by themselves.”

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