Mother arms schoolkids with water bottles
Posted on Monday, October 22, 2007
When Rhonda Fincher asked who was a little bit thirsty at that very minute, hundreds of hands shot toward the ceiling of the Crystal Hill Elementary School cafetorium.
Of course if you ever wanted to illustrate the old saw “monkey see, monkey do,” a room jammed with 7- to 11-yearolds would be the place to try. But most of the teachers and adult volunteers who rode herd Oct. 11 on several hundred wellmannered kids also raised their hands.
Nobody had been running around sweating. It was barely later than 9: 15 a.m. And yet everybody was thirsty.
But that’s the way it goes at school, right ? Students just have to get used to going without water.
Fincher, director of the Kendrick Fincher Memorial Foundation in Rogers, came to the North Little Rock school to announce that Principal Karen Fikes and her faculty are about to change that reality. No longer will good comportment at Crystal Hill inadvertently entail chronic dehydration.
“You’re all going to get a squeeze bottle like this,” she said, holding up a 20-ounce plastic water bottle bearing the word “Beehydrated” above a colorful bee designed by a Rogers schoolgirl.
Children need to stay hydrated, she said, because their bodies are supposed to be about 75 percent water. If anyone tells them they’re full of baloney, well, he’s wrong.
While the smart kids furrowed their brows, the fidgets scootched in their seats and the woolgatherers stared into who knows what, she explained how to figure out how much water to drink.
“All of you are 5 years old or older, right ?” “Yesss !” hundreds of voices cried.
“Yes. So all of you should have at least 50 ounces of liquid a day,” Fincher said, showing them the squeeze bottle. “This is 20 ounces. So 50 ounces is 2 1 / 2 of these....
“ Once you reach 100 pounds, you take your weight and divide it by 2.” In elementary schools across Arkansas, teachers line up their students every so often and march everyone into the hall, where everyone learns how to stand in line (a not-inconsequential skill ) and each child gets a drink of water at a fountain. But even if each child spends just three seconds drinking (and some teachers will count aloud “1, 2, 3” to speed them along ), that’s still several minutes taken from days overloaded with teaching duties, Fincher said.
And how much good does it do, anyway ? From the sea of volunteers, she picked three students of different heights, handed each a cup and asked a teacher to take them out to the fountain. While the rest of the room squealed and groaned, she directed them to sip water as they usually would but instead of swallowing to, ahem, save it in the cup.
While the sippers filed out, she asked the assembly, “How many ounces of water do you think you get when you go to the fountain ?” The general din predicted 1 to 5 ounces. “You are more conservative than most,” she told them.
But only one child returned holding so much as 1 ounce. The other two had sipped far, far less.
Could they do the math in their heads ? If a kid drank, say, 2 ounces during morning fountain break, 8 ounces of milk at lunch and another 2 ounces of water at an afternoon fountain stop, would that be enough ?
“Your brain is about 85 percent water. What do you think happens when your brain gets dehydrated ?” she asked. “What about if you haven’t had much water to drink and you have a test at 1 o’clock in the afternoon ?” People begin to feel thirsty when they’re just 1 percent dehydrated. “By the time that you’re thirsty there is a 10 percent reduction in your ability to concentrate,” she said.
Being thirsty in class might make them feel fuzzy, but showing up dehydrated to play sports in the heat after school could lead to heat stroke.
That’s when Rhonda Fincher explained why she wants elementary students to understand the importance of proper hydration.
“Some people wonder why this organization is called the Kendrick Fincher Memorial Foundation,” she said.
Her son Kendrick was an eighth-grader in 1995. The family had moved to Arkansas that year from a cooler state, so he wasn’t used to August heat and humidity. He suffered heat stroke on the first day of football practice and died 18 days later.
She briefly described heat illness and how it progresses rapidly.
She told them about a study that found 70 percent of afterschool athletes are dehydrated before they get to the playing field.
“The coach doesn’t know what you’ve been drinking all day. But you know,” she said.
“Your body is not equipped to handle heat the way the older people are. The most you should be practicing [sports ] in the heat without a water break is about 20 minutes — not 30, not 40, not 45, not an hour. If it’s cooler and you haven’t been sweating a lot you can go 25 or 30, but you need that break after 20 minutes and you should drink 8 to 12 ounces at that first break.” The foundation is giving the school 800 squeeze bottles, one for each student, with the idea that teachers will let them drink when they want to throughout the day. It might take two weeks before their bodies adapt to being properly hydrated, she said, and in that time bathroom breaks could be an issue.
“It’s a good thing if you have to go to the bathroom,” she said, to general titters.
She urged them to write their names on their bottles.
They could use their first water break to fill it up in the morning — or fill it before school starts. “Then you don’t need water fountain breaks,” she told the teachers, and that also cuts down on germ-sharing during flu season.
Keep your bottle clean, she said. Rinse the cap daily. Fill the bottle with fresh water every day and don’t drink hot water that’s been sitting in the sun; refill it with cool fresh water before sports practice. Send it through the dishwasher once a week.
Principal Fikes said the faculty will consider letting children keep their bottles in their desks. Although the foundation is providing the bottles for free, the school is collecting pennies to make a donation so other kids can also have free water bottles at school.
Fincher said she relies on donations so the foundation can supply bottles free to organizations that ask. “Right now there have been about 10, 000 we haven’t been able to [provide ] this year. But we have been able to fulfill 40, 000, which is awesome,” she said.
“I don’t want the kids to think of them as a free squeeze bottle. I want them to think of them as a hydration tool.” More information about the Kendrick Fincher Memorial Foundation is at (479 ) 986-9960, info@kendrickfincher. org and www. kendrickfincher. org.
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