Jonathan Swift wrote "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." Sadly he writes nothing of when dunces are in cahoots against each other.
Any legislative session is filled with bills that are proposed and never leave committee. Bills are assigned to a committee and debated so every bill will not take up precious time on the floor. With the Kentucky assembly only meeting for 99 days there are certain things that must be done for the commonwealth of Kentucky to maintain operations. The legislature has 99 days to approve a budget, the only act it is required to do. They finally approved a proposed budget on the last available day, and only by stopping the clocks a little before midnight did it get it done.
During the previous 98 days the Kentucky Assembly approved 179 proposed laws out of the more than one thousand bills filed for this legislative session. Of the 179 news laws and regulations approved by the Assembly there are some that help homeowners achieve energy efficiency and others that increase the amount of college aid available for Kentucky students. There are others, such as the controversial casino gambling bill and the stopping of mountain top removal mining bill, that were very publicly stopped in their tracks. But there were yet more, such as SB 17 (08RS), that were pushed to the wayside for more mainstream causes.
The bill, “An act relating to the promotion of physical activity in schools” was written to help fight the rising problem of childhood obesity by mandating a physical activity requirement for elementary and middle school children. It would require at least 30 minutes a day of structured physical activity beginning in the 2008-2009 school year.
The federal Department of Health and Human Services has released statistics saying that over seventeen percent of adolescents are at least overweight, leading to a higher risk of diabetes and heart problems, and Kentucky is no exception. The Trust for America’s Health found that in 2004, the last year data had been collected, Kentucky ranked third in the states with the most overweight children with over twenty percent of the age group considered overweight.
While the Assembly is busy with a myriad of other pressing problems they will have to deal with this problem eventually, only by then it won’t be childhood obesity but the harder to control, economy draining adult kind.
