There’s no question that the D.C. Council’s recently proposed Healthy Schools Act would seriously improve public schools. Among other things, the bill would mandate that school cafeterias serve more “green” produce, set new nutritional standards for cafeteria food and increase the amount of mandatory P.E. for students of all ages. While D.C. should pass most of the bill, it needs to rethink the P.E. portion because of the strain it places on teachers.

D.C. public schools currently require 90 minutes of P.E. per week for students in grades K through eight. If the Healthy Schools Act passes, elementary schools would have to provide 30 minutes of P.E. per day and middle schools would have to provide 45 minutes per day. This would bring D.C. more in line with Montgomery County, which also requires middle schools to give an average of 45 minutes of P.E. per day.

In a perfect world, this would be a great change, since an alarming 35.4 percent of D.C. children are obese or overweight, and schools are a great way for D.C. to mandate exercise. Unfortunately, D.C. schools already fail to properly educate students. With only 27 percent of public schools making “Adequate Yearly Progress” under the No Child Left Behind Act and more than half of all students not proficient in reading or math, schools need to devote all of their available time and resources to teaching necessary academic skills.

While the current P.E. regimen doesn’t require as much time as Montgomery County, it’s sufficient enough that administrators can leave it as is while improving other aspects of school. If other parts of this bill pass, the added focus on nutrition would improve student health without taking away precious class time. Simply put, DCPS prioritizes failing students over obese students-as they should.

Perhaps the best solution to this would be to make participation in the new program voluntary and up to each principal’s discretion. This would allow schools with better test grades to address the serious problem of obesity while also letting lower-achieving schools opt out of the program. The bill could give D.C. the power to override some of the choices, but ultimately no one knows a school’s needs better than its administrators.

The primary purpose of school is to educate students in academic areas, not to make sure they are physically fit. Students have other times of day to exercise if they feel like doing so, but the school system only has around six hours to teach them. Taking up more of those hours with P.E. would not help the school system.