Is ‘Quarantine 15’ here to stay? What school fitness testing reveals about health and well-being of kids across the state — and across income levels.
Student fitness rates at Connecticut public schools had been stable for over a decade.
But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in spring 2020, they went into free fall. Four years later, they’re still falling.
Results of the Connecticut Physical Fitness Assessment — administered annually in each of the state’s 200 public school districts — are unambiguous: data show children are less physically fit now than they were before the pandemic. A Courant analysis of assessment data from the Connecticut Department of Education found that physical fitness has declined in public schools across the state, with low-income districts hit hardest.
Budget cuts, limited PE time, lack of consistency in requirement for physical education for younger students, pandemic-era “inertia” habits and diets, and socio-economic issues plays a role in the declines, experts said. The state is working with districts to increase funding for fitness and expand offerings for physical activity during and after school.
For the first time since 2008-09, when the Great Recession reduced physical activity nationwide, fewer than half of Connecticut students reached the state’s target fitness level as determined by the assessment. What’s more, there’s a 20-percent gap in pass rates between the state’s highest- and lowest-income school districts, the assessment data show.
Further, although pass rates fell approximately 7% across the board, lower-income districts had far lower pass rates to begin with, assessment data show. This comes as economic and social costs of American obesity — including treatment for obesity and obesity-related diseases like diabetes and cardiovascular disease — exceed $1.4 trillion annually, reports show.
The pass rates and change in that rate varied across the state. For example, nearly 60% of Meriden students reached the state’s physical fitness standard during the 2018-19 school year. By 2021-22, that pass rate had plummeted to 38%. At Achievement First Bridgeport Academy, a public charter school, the pass rate dropped from 50% to 15% in that period. In Sharon, the rate went from 60% to 41%. In Deep River, it went from 84% to 33%, Department of Education assessment data show.
Lisa Daly, the health and physical education supervisor for West Hartford Public Schools, said that pandemic disruptions to in-person physical education relegated exercise to the home, where lower-income students have fewer opportunities.
“I think it’s access and equity — access to backyards, access to playgrounds, access to after-school sports. That plays a role in fitness,” Daly said. “Some kids have different after-school responsibilities. Some kids can’t go out and play because they have to take care of their siblings … That was exacerbated during the pandemic.”
In Daly’s district, one on the higher end in terms of resources, pass rates hovered around 55% for over a decade. But in 2021-22 — the first post-pandemic school year for which statewide data are available — pass rates fell to 40%. The next year, they fell to 35%.
Yale public health Professor Rafael Pérez-Escamilla said that pandemic social-distancing measures and elevated psycho-emotional stress “very likely led to weight gain and corresponding metabolic alterations” among adolescents. For many — especially young people — the so-called “Quarantine 15” was more than just a social-media tagline.
“As a public health scholar, I am very concerned about the decline in physical fitness among adolescents in our state since the COVID-19 pandemic started, especially because their fitness was already in poor shape before,” Pérez-Escamilla said. “Special attention needs to be given to addressing inequities among the youth living in low-income areas as these are the ones that have been hit the strongest by the pandemic.”
He added that even before the pandemic, many schools in lower-income communities could not provide students with adequate time for physical education and recreational activities.
Daly told the Courant that there has “always” been a socioeconomic discrepancy in fitness performance across schools even within her district. She said that of the 17 West Hartford public schools, the five that qualify for Title I funding see lower pass rates on the state fitness assessment. Title I is a federal program that supports lower-income students by distributing money to schools with a greater number of students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.
Students taking the fitness assessment are evaluated across four subcomponents: upper body strength and endurance, abdominal muscle strength and endurance, aerobic endurance and flexibility. To reach the overall fitness standard, students must reach the fitness standard for all four subcomponents.
Joe Velardi, who helped develop the fitness assessment as coordinator for health and physical education at the Connecticut Association of Schools, called declining performance “a canary in the coal mine.”
“It’s not just the fact that this year’s fitness standards testing waned a little bit — it’s a bigger issue with kids and activity and fitness and health in general,” Velardi said. “The time for health and physical education in schools is getting shaved away all across the state.”
Daly said that when Connecticut schools face budget cuts, physical education is often first on the chopping block. She and Velardi said they think that increasing PE time could narrow the socio-economic fitness gap and improve fitness overall.
Pérez-Escamilla, too, said that limited PE time is a problem and called the socio-economic discrepancy “very worrisome.”
“It’s been a trend over the past decade for PE programs to get budget cuts,” Velardi said. “I talked to a lot of teachers across the state, and that’s the concern — programming going away. … If you’re a PE teacher and you’re only seeing your kids once a week, the effect you have is minimal.”
Connecticut state law requires all public schools to offer physical education in their curricula, but there is no statutory PE time or credit requirement for elementary and middle schools. State law does, however, require high-school students to earn a minimum of one PE credit — defined as the equivalent of a 40-minute class period each school day for one school year — in order to graduate.
Velardi said that these laws leave the duration and frequency of physical education “up to the interpretation” of each school district.
Districts with lower performance in subjects such as math and English language arts — which are disproportionately low-income — may decide to allocate time and resources away from PE. Fitness performance seems to suffer in these districts, per school accountability data from the Department of Education. Fitness scores are best, by contrast, in the academically high-achieving districts that can afford to devote more resources to PE.
Thus, budget reallocations aimed at improving academic performance in lower-income districts may widen the socio-economic fitness gap.
“There’s an overall correlation between your physical fitness and your academic performance,” Daly said. “I just don’t think health and physical education get the kudos they deserve. Students’ physical wellbeing impacts their emotional, mental, spiritual, occupational and academic wellbeing.”
That’s why John Frassinelli, division director for school health at the Connecticut Department of Education, believes it’s critical to “reverse the trend” of declining adolescent fitness — and to do so quickly.
Frassinelli said that he has been working with districts across the state to expand offerings for physical activity during and after school. He also said that the state has provided additional funding to this end.
It’s likely to take time: Unlike the quick rebound of school fitness scores after the Great Recession — scores returned to normal in just one school year — the COVID-19 fitness decline has shown staying power.
Exercise physiologist Matthew Stults said that the diet and exercise habits many adolescents developed during the pandemic have “behavioral inertia.” Students were in on-again, off-again quarantine for years, and old habits die hard.
“Once you develop sedentary habits, it’s difficult to reverse course and make them physically active habits,” Stults said. “People were exercising less, eating more highly palatable food.”
These habits form “a vicious cycle,” he said.
According to Yale epidemiology and anthropology Professor Nicola Hawley, there’s also strong evidence that physical fitness in childhood and adolescence impacts longer-term cardiovascular health.
The more schools can improve their students’ fitness results, she said, the better they can prevent later disease.
