Columnist Scott Dickensheets: Readers weigh in on heavy backpacks

Scott Dickensheets

Tuesday, Feb. 2, 1999 | 11:14 a.m.

Yeah, I get mail, both e- and voice. Mostly it's pleasant or informative or an ad for some porno website, although now and then I'll get a valentine like this one, from an anonymous Ohio man: "I hope you rot in hell and die," he croaked into my voice mail.

I usually respond with a polite note or amused chiding (people generally die first, then rot in hell, but either way it beats living in Ohio), but it's been a while since I saw fit to air reader mail in this space. However, I've gotten a fair amount of mail on an unexpected topic: heavy backpacks at school, subject of a recent column.

It's worth revisiting in part because, in my haste to quote principals and school district spokesmen and health officials, I gave short shrift to a vital set of experts: the kids beneath the packs. Let's remedy that now.

"I am a backpack carrier myself," writes a middle-schooler named Adam. "It weighs out at 18 pounds, and at my school that is considered light." Particularly if he's not exaggerating about this: "Now and then I see people with two backpacks. One on their backs and the other in their hands."

Then came this, from a 13-year-old named Juli, another backpack sufferer. She's not merely griping about it, however; she has a solution. "If the schools weren't built with lockers (except for instruments), they would have more money to buy books ... children could keep a book at home and have one at school."

She also had this to say: Straighten up, kids! She doesn't blame all student backaches on heavy bags. "More than 95 percent of children sit slouching down instead of sitting straight up. Then we go home and sit around watching television, playing on the computer, doing homework, etc."

"I was pleased that someone else is aware of the 'Hefty Backpack Syndrome,"' writes a grandmother named Sharon. Get a load of the load her granddaughter in Virginia carries: "(She's) 9 years old and in fourth grade, and totes a backpack every day that weighs 25-30 pounds." Gads! Unless the girl's school is training her to be a stevedore, that's absurd -- although it still beats living in Ohio.

One remedy, as suggested by Juli, would be for schools to provide duplicate textbooks for home and school. That's the situation at Becker Middle School, which I held up as being the right idea. Not so fast, says the parent of one Becker kid.

"What (Principal Cathy) Andrews didn't tell you is what is necessary in the notebooks these children carry. My daughter's notebook alone weighs approximately 3 or 4 pounds on any given day." Contrary to the Becker party line about a campus free of hefty backpack syndrome, this parent insists students do lug books between classes. "My daughter carries a backpack around all day weighing anywhere from 12-15 pounds." Because of that, the parents feel compelled to drive her the easily walked half-mile to school.

It wasn't always like that, of course; I biked five or six miles to junior high in Henderson, and I don't recall carrying anything heavier than my dread of math class. This is the sort of issue professional educators can easily dismiss as minor, given the heavy pack of concerns on the school district's back -- overcrowding, new school construction, old school retrofitting.

But, the opinions of professional educators aside, kids find heavy packs a drag. I can't help but sympathize a little as they wonder if the school district will ever get off their backs.