Anyone who has tried to heft the average 8th grader’s school backpack without first doing some warm-up exercises should be forewarned: You could end up in traction. Some kids’ backpacks tip the scales at upwards of 35 pounds, crammed with books and supplies. The menace of the increasingly weighty backpacks has been creeping for several years now. Doctors have warned of potential back injury to kids, parents have complained, and schools have sometimes banned them because they take up too much space. But no one has discovered the cure.
Until California, that is.
The problem, as California officials deduced, was fiendish in its simplicity. Textbooks, they said, were too heavy because they contained too much information. Books have been bloated by ever-greater curriculum demands and increasing achievement standards imposed by state and federal law.
California Gov. Gray Davis’ solution: put textbooks on a diet. He signed a bill last September banning textbooks that exceed a certain weight limit, starting in 2004. He left those weight limits to be set by state education officials.
Other states–not so far Illinois, thankfully–are now considering such legislation, all in the name of kid’s backs. Even if they do nothing, the California law still could ripple throughout the country, because the Golden State usually spends more than any other state on textbooks, and publishers often take into account California regulations when compiling new textbooks.
But wait. There are a few things that should be considered before expurgating books. For one thing, a recent study in the journal Pediatrics asserts that most children’s acute backpack-related injuries are not back strains, but cuts and sprains from tripping over or getting hit by a backpack. One of the doctors who did that study says the dire warnings of children’s back injuries from heavy backpacks is “overblown.”
That won’t be the final word, of course. And certainly some kids do strain themselves with overloaded backpacks. But surely there must be some other ways to ease the pain. Although putting books on Weight Watchers may be appealing in some states (Kansas school districts would probably start with the chapter on evolution), have we exhausted all other possibilities?
Some schools have considered buying two sets of books–one for school, one for home. But that is costly. What about a high-tech solution? Why not post the book on the Internet, and let kids download necessary chapters as needed? Or put the books on CDs? For a while, it seemed like wheeled carts–known as wheelies–were part of the solution. But the proliferation of the carts wreaked havoc in school hallways, and were banned in some schools.
Maybe schools could take a cue from airports. Check your backpack at the door, tag it, and a “handler” whisks it to, say, fourth-period algebra. Or maybe it ends up in Dubuque, depending on how closely the school follows the airline model.
OK, we’re kidding about that. The point is, we’re all for protecting children’s backs, but let’s not follow California’s lead by slicing textbooks. As one California principal said of the new law: “It doesn’t make a ton of sense.”
