Charles Kong Soo

Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Tim Gopeesingh is hop­ing that by im­prov­ing the sports and phys­i­cal ed­u­ca­tion pro­grammes in schools it will lead to fit­ter minds and bod­ies and help re­duce the grow­ing waist­lines among stu­dents and obe­si­ty in the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion.He was speak­ing at the launch of the Sport Ad­vi­so­ry Com­mit­tee in Ed­u­ca­tion at a me­dia con­fer­ence at the min­istry's head of­fice in St Clair, Wednes­day.

"As you all know the favourite say­ing, 'Mens sana in cor­pore sano' (a sound mind in a sound body), this is what we're go­ing to be mov­ing for, par­tic­u­lar­ly when re­cent­ly you would have seen that T&T is rat­ed as hav­ing a very high obese and over­weight pop­u­la­tion," Gopeesingh said."There is a marked sit­u­a­tion where close to 15 per cent of the school pop­u­la­tion is obese."

Com­mit­tee mem­ber Lar­ry Ro­many said At­lantic had been con­duct­ing obe­si­ty test­ing in all schools and ex­pect­ed it to be com­plet­ed by the end of Ju­ly.He said 25 per cent of test­ing was done so far. Ro­many said the da­ta would be analysed by Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­si­ty for so­lu­tions and the find­ings would be dis­cussed with Gopeesingh.

When asked to elab­o­rate fur­ther on Health Min­is­ter Fuad Khan's re­cent state­ments on the high preva­lence of obe­si­ty and di­a­betes in school chil­dren, Gopeesingh said UWI's Fac­ul­ty of Med­ical Sci­ences Prof Paul Teelucks­ingh and his re­search team had con­duct­ed di­a­betes test­ing on more than 17,000 stu­dents and dis­cov­ered about less than three per cent or clos­er to one per cent of the school pop­u­la­tion with ju­ve­nile di­a­betes.

Gopeesingh said, how­ev­er, the method­ol­o­gy might have to be re­viewed. He said Khan and him­self had been man­dat­ed by Cab­i­net to come up with a na­tion­al pol­i­cy on nu­tri­tion and he had asked for a re­view on the al­most 200,000 meals per day that were pro­vid­ed for school chil­dren by the Na­tion­al Schools Di­etary Ser­vices Ltd.

Gopeesingh said he was al­so aware of the ques­tions raised re­gard­ing the high caloric drinks con­sump­tion in­take in school­child­ren and that would re­quire na­tion­al con­sul­ta­tion in­volv­ing many stake­hold­ers be­fore a de­ter­mi­na­tion was made.The com­mit­tee has been man­dat­ed to achieve this goal by ad­vis­ing the min­istry on a way for­ward to de­vel­op a struc­tured method­ol­o­gy to re-en­gi­neer and em­bed sports and phys­i­cal ed­u­ca­tion with­in the coun­try's ed­u­ca­tion­al cur­ricu­lum.

The com­mit­tee will work close­ly with the min­istry's Cur­ricu­lum Di­vi­sion to in­cul­cate sev­er­al sport­ing dis­ci­plines in­to the phys­i­cal ed­u­ca­tion cur­ricu­lum, as well as cre­ate a sense of trust in the minds of ed­u­ca­tion­al stake­hold­ers and bene­fac­tors, on the poli­cies, goals and ob­jec­tives for ful­ly im­plant­i­ng sport in schools.It will al­so be hold­ing con­sul­ta­tions with stake­hold­ers on how the re-en­gi­neer­ing and re­align­ing of sport and phys­i­cal ed­u­ca­tion should progress in the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem.

The Sport Ad­vi­so­ry Com­mit­tee com­pris­es sev­er­al out­stand­ing na­tion­al sports per­son­al­i­ties, name­ly 1976 Olympic gold medal­list Hase­ly Craw­ford, for­mer na­tion­al and West In­dies crick­eter Deryck Mur­ray, for­mer na­tion­al net­baller Cheryl Pe­ters, for­mer foot­baller and Trinidad and To­ba­go coach Alvin Corneal and sport ad­min­is­tra­tors Dou­glas Ca­ma­cho, An­nette Knott and Lar­ry Ro­many.