Recess being withheld from students for poor behavior, snack time being taken from children, PE slowly being taken away from schools....these are disturbing trends in education, trends that are not beneficial to children, in fact, some would argue are damaging to children( I would). We have a solution! There is no magic bullet, no one thing will bring about the change so many desperately want. School leaders and teachers are NOT bad people, educators are under extreme pressure to produce results, and in the process of responding to that pressure, have gotten away from what they know to be right; addressing children as whole people. We have a generation of kids whose life expectancy is less than us, their parents (Brownell & Horgan, 2004). We can change this, we can feed our kids decent meals at school, we can allow them to PLAY at RECESS, we can provide PE daily....and we can achieve high test scores while doing it. Our purpose has gotten lost in the pressure for results....our purpose is to create well-rounded citizens who can solve problems that don't yet exist. Our purpose is to address children as people, we don't teach only content, we teach children. At True North, we believe that we can help educators reconnect to that purpose, we can help educators incorporate movement and play INTO core instruction, we can help food service provide nutritous, healthy, and DELICIOUS meals. What are we telling our children about their worth when we deny them opportunities to be human? True North can help change what is wrong, we need educators to step up and reconnect to their True North, to stand up to the absurdity of one testing determining a child's worth, we are better than that as a nation and as a people.
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