Backpacks restricted at some area schools

Jeffrey Libby

Friday, Nov. 22, 2002 | 11:15 a.m.

For 11-year-old sixth grader Keri Colline, something is missing at school.

"I miss my backpack," Colline said Thursday afternoon.

Her low-slung, pink backpack, filled with the essentials of middle-school life, is confined to her locker during the school day under a new rule handed down at Boulder City's Garrett Middle School.

The school is following a national trend and is one of a handful of campuses in the Clark County School District that bans backpacks during class hours. The ban, said Garrett Principal Jim LaBuda, is designed to protect students such as Colline, who at 63 pounds is nearly outweighed some days by the textbooks, notebooks, binders and purse that fill her pack.

"The bottom-line first concern is just the weight they're carrying on their backs," LaBuda said.

Parents and educators are faced with an increasing number of medical studies that suggest backpacks stuffed with textbooks pose a health risk for growing children. LaBuda, like other principals who have banned backpacks, is budgeting money to provide double sets of books -- for home and for school -- and in the meantime, administrators are planning homework assignments with lighter loads in mind.

But for students such as Colline and her sister Samantha Hodgkin, the packs are a convenience and a fashion statement that they are reluctant to give up. The heavy loads leave Hodgkin, a budding trombonist, with a sore back and slumped posture by day's end.

"Parents complained that we're developing scoliosis," she said.

The problem is getting serious enough that some states are grappling with it. In California, Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill into law earlier this year that requires the state Board of Education to adopt backpack weight standards for elementary through high school students by July 2004.

The law is designed to minimize health risks for students. It cites a Consumer Product Safety Commission report that says in 1999 more than 3,400 students between ages 5 and 14 sought treatment in hospitals for backpack-related injuries.

June Million, spokeswoman for the National Association of Elementary School Principals, in Alexandria, Va., said her group issued its first advisory on backpack safety in 1999 after consulting with orthopedic surgeons.

"There's a concern that kids have with all the new testing and accountability," Million said. "There are a lot more books going home on every subject."

In Clark County, the issue has been handled on a school-by-school basis and only a few report some sort of rules.

Douglas Gougar, principal of Brown Junior High School in Henderson, said students are not allowed to carry backpacks between classes because of health concerns. Thurman White Junior High School did the same some years ago, said Principal Pat Skorkowsky, and gave students two sets of books: one for home, the other for school.

Additionally Brown, like many Clark County schools, has more students than the facility was originally intended to serve.

"We're built for 800 kids and we have 1,400," Gougar said. "Every kid with a giant backpack is like adding another person. Our hallways are crowded enough."

In Boulder City, a teacher-parent committee led by LaBuda took up the issue earlier this year after teachers complained about students spending class time digging through overstuffed bags and parental complaints about their children's back pain.

As of Nov. 4, between first bell and lunch, and from after lunch to the end of school, the backpacks have been banned. LaBuda added an extra minute between classes, from three to four in most cases, so students can head for their lockers for books, not packs.

The first few days, LaBuda said, it made him chuckle to watch a line of 25 to 30 kids form, waiting for the hall monitor to retrieve the locker combination they hadn't used since school opened in August.

"The girls are carrying more purses now, and there's a mini-pack, but it's probably only 10 inches high and can't fit a book," LaBuda said.

Regional superintendent Edward Goldman, who oversees 60 schools in the Clark County School District's southeast area, said every school can make its own rules on backpacks, but the trend is toward lighter loads.

"We have to ensure we're not causing kids to carry 50 pounds of books in their bag," he said. "They're little kids."

But stopping them from loading up a staggering pack won't be easy, Goldman said. He has a daughter in junior high.

"Her teachers don't know what she's got in her backpack, and we fight her every morning. I can't even lift it," he said. "But the kids have to have their backpack and it has to be a certain type. It's one of those mysteries."

But LaBude decided that the health of kids' backs outweighed their mysterious penchant for slowing themselves to a star-struck trudge.

Dr. Larry Satkowiak, a pediatric physician in the University Medical Center emergency room, says though few kids end up under his care, the health concern is very real.

"This is a more chronic type injury. They end up with small fractures, stress fractures or unusual injuries, but it's very well reported in the general pediatric literature," Satkowiak said.

"Children are bone growing machines and any time you put undue stresses on them, you can make bones grow in unusual ways."

Many students say, however, that LaBuda's edict is too strict, that a compromise is in order.

"A lot of teachers are complaining because kids are forgetting their homework," said Jack Broadbent, a Garrett sixth grader plying the sidewalk with an over-sized backpack behind him and a small cello slung in front of him. "A lot of people are saying it should be optional."

Parent Travis Chandler, whose son is a seventh grader at Garrett, sees the rule as an infringement on children's privacy. Once backpacks go in lockers, they are "open game" for an arbitrary search by school officials, he said.

"I wish they'd teach them where Afghanistan is," he said. "I wish they'd go back to pure academics. That way, the Millennium Scholars wouldn't have to be taking remedial classes when they get to college."

But Bertha Frantz, parent of a sixth grader at Garrett, said even women's purses can cause back problems over the long term. The school should do what it can to teach kids healthy habits, she said.

"We're not taking anything away and we're teaching them responsibility and organization in their lives," Frantz said. "So I'm a mother for no backpacks."

Hodgkin, the trombonist, said the backpack ban is already helping her. In the two weeks since the school introduced the ban, she said her posture has improved and so have her renditions of "Jingle Bells" and "Dradle, Dradle," two songs the band is practicing for a Christmas concert.

"With all the weight, I would want to hunch over, not sit up straight," Hodgkin said. "It was causing problems with my trombone."

Now, she said, "I can get more air into my lungs, to get all the opening notes."