Doyel: How to build leaner kids, better learners

Thomas Campbell has no idea he's exercising. As far as he knows, he's sitting in Miss Sitzman's first-grade class at Frederick Douglass School. As far as he knows, he's learning. And he is. He's sitting at his desk and he's going over spelling words, but he's not sitting on a chair. He's sitting on one of those big bouncy balls you see in a gym, a stabilizing ball that strengthens your core.

Thomas Campbell is working his abs, and he has no idea.

"I like the ball," he says, and he smiles, and that's just one of the small victories at Frederick Douglass, also known as IPS School 19, also known as Super School. This is a school, and IPS is a school district, that could use some victories. Thanks to the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon, the wins are starting to pile up.

Thomas Campbell is working his abs as he spells out f-i-s-h in Miss Sitzman's class. Down the hall, fifth-grader Leshly Soto is walking on a mini-elliptical trainer – the kids call it a "moonwalker," but you and I know it's a cardio machine – as she reads a history lesson. Another fifth-grader, Alyssa Smith, is watching math facts on a projector screen and jumping on a mini-trampoline. The screen asks: What is 12 times 5?

Alyssa lands on the trampoline, sinks down, rockets upward and says, "60."

The kids at Frederick Douglass have no idea what they've started, but three years ago they were the ground floor of a movement – it's called the Monumental Kids Movement – that is spreading all over IPS, starting small as these things do but growing so far and so fast that the biggest benefactor behind it all, the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon, is overwhelmed in the best way possible.

"It's crazy to think what's happening here," IMM executive director Blake Boldon tells me.

It's crazy, and it's beautiful, and it smells like victory.

* * *

It started with a bad test score.

The kids at Frederick Douglass were among the heaviest in the city. IPS administers a battery of health and fitness tests every year, and the kids at Frederick Douglass bombed it. Obesity was rampant at School 19, and obesity isn't a function merely of appearance. It's a function of health, and nationwide, our kids – we – are eating ourselves to death. Childhood obesity has doubled in children and tripled in teens in the past 30 years. For the first time in centuries, according to the New England Journal of Medicine, today's U.S. children may face a shorter life expectancy than their parents.

Not on Aleicha Ostler's watch.

Ostler is principal at Frederick Douglass, and with IPS' help, she began to search for solutions to her school's health issues. They came upon something on the East Coast called BOKS (Build Our Kids' Success), a 40-minute exercise program before school. Ostler called Frederick Douglass physical education teacher Julie Herdman and asked if she'd report an hour early two days a week to implement BOKS at School 19.

"She said no," Ostler says. "She said, 'Let's do it five days a week.' "

That's where it started. Where it ends? It doesn't end, not until every school kid in Indianapolis is sitting on a stabilizing ball or riding a stationary bike or shooting baskets as she is quizzed on multiplication, as I swear to you I saw Timia Washington-Wilburn doing Friday at Frederick Douglass. That's the goal of IMM leaders like Boldon and community outreach manager Casey Collins, whose organization has donated more than $600,000 toward school fitness, and who spend their days thinking up ways to trick – er, encourage – kids into exercising as they learn.

"Every school in IPS," Collins tells me. "We'd love that to happen."

If you're a parent, you want it to happen. The kids at Frederick Douglass, they're not just getting healthier – though they are. It didn't take but six months for School 19's obesity rate to drop nearly 20 percent and the school to measure among the six most aerobically fit in IPS.

But it's not just the kids' bodies. Their brains. Ostler was telling me about the kindergarten class that piloted the Monumental Kids Movement two years ago, how it did things in the classroom she'd never seen.

"By the end of the (kindergarten) year 100 percent of that class was reading at a first-grade level, and had already moved to first-grade material!" Ostler yells, because news this good cannot be delivered stoically. "Usually it's in the low 90s, and it was in the low 90s in our other kindergarten classes. But the one class that was using the (MKM) principals – 100 percent."

Fifth-grade teacher Jen Perdue has a theory why. What she says won't sound real, but give it a shot. Imagine you saw what I saw Friday at Frederick Douglass – rooms full of kids on bikes and trampolines and elliptical machines, behaving themselves and singing out the correct answers to math and reading and history questions. And then listen to Jen Perdue say why it's working:

"The kids want to be here," she says. "They want to be here. I love to teach and thought I was happy before, but if somebody said I'd have to go back to the way I taught before all this? I think I'd cry."

* * *

This sort of thing, it mushrooms in ways nobody saw coming. More than a third of Frederick Douglass School – 150 kids out of an enrollment of 422 – reports an hour early for the BOKS program. The busiest station in the lunch room is the salad bar. Last time the principal treated a class to a Subway lunch, she messed up and ordered the regular chips. Not the baked kind.

"The kids wouldn't eat them," Ostler says. "One little girl told me, 'These are disgusting.' "

Herdman, the P.E. teacher, took a class to an archery field trip in Broad Ripple. She sent them to the concession stand with their snack money, and they came back empty-handed.

"Nothing but junk food," the kids told her.

Frederick Douglass is a magnet school that provides free lunches to 82.9 percent of its students, but in two years has become one of the most coveted transfer schools in IPS, with waiting lists between 10 and 75 kids for grades 1-8.

Frederick Douglass remains the only school in IPS to have a school-wide kinesthetic approach to learning – indeed, IPS believes it's the only such school in the state – but five other IPS schools have started installing similar equipment, and almost 20 IPS schools offer BOKS in the morning. At Meredith Nicholson School 96 and Jonathan Jennings School 109, kids jog every day. School 109 has a one-sixth-mile cinder track out back, but it's so small and neglected, with grass sprouting everywhere, the kids run on nearby streets. IPS is going to fix that next month, when it partners with the United Way to clean up the track and lengthen it to a quarter-mile.

Running is at the core of this IPS health wave. Three years after partnering with Frederick Douglass for a nine-week running program that rewards regular participants with free entry into its 5K race in November, Monumental Marathon now has 31 schools in the program. More than 2,000 kids qualified for the 5K on Nov. 1, and although it was the morning after Halloween and there was an overnight freeze warning, 894 kids showed up, all dressed in bright green, flooding that course like an army of neon M&M's.

"We have some work to do on our running etiquette," says Kathy Langdon, IPS Health and Wellness Supervisor, and she says it smiling. Almost 1,000 kids, waking up the morning after Halloween to run 3.1 miles? That's a victory.

So is this: As I'm walking the halls of Frederick Douglass with folks from Indianapolis Monumental Marathon, peeking in rooms at kids on their bikes and trampolines, middle-school teacher Alithia Anderson comes around the corner with something to say.

"Three years ago my son (Nick) ran his first 5K," she says. "He's running the (IMM) mini-marathon this year."

This is what victory looks like. It looks like a teacher, a mother, standing happily in a school hallway and trying not to cry.

Find Star columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at@GreggDoyelStar or atwww.facebook.com/gregg.doyel