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Health: Schoolchildren get into stand-up act

Karen Weintraub
Special for USA TODAY

By now, most adults have gotten the message that slumping in a desk chair all day long isn’t very healthy. Over the last five years, standing desks have gone from an office oddity to a staple.

Teacher Melissa Nelson-Irving, left, of Belle Terre Elementary School  in Florida is a big booster of standup desks in the classroom.

So it should come as no surprise that companies that make standing desks are now looking to get more students standing. Ergotron Inc. of St. Paul, for instance, has donated its standing desks to five classrooms across the country – hoping to spark more interest in their product.

It certainly worked that way in the Belle Terre Elementary School in Flagler County, Fla. Fourth graders and their teacher, Melissa Nelson-Irving, became huge standing-desk boosters after trying them out.

“When I first heard of it, I was wondering would it help me? Would I be tired?” said now-sixth grader Emma Kalcounos.

But it didn’t take long for her to get excited about her standing desk. “It helped me get more focused,” said Emma, a soccer buff who also loves math. Instead of being exhausting, standing most of the day “makes me more alert and ready for the next thing.”

Emma also liked being able to adjust the desk to her height. The wheels made it easy for the kids to rearrange their desks into groups for projects, and different shapes when they were studying geometry.

Teacher Nelson-Irving, who has now moved up to fifth grade – along with the $500 apiece desks – said she’d experimented with a variety of approaches over the years to keep her students engaged and awake.

“Kids need to be up and moving,” Nelson-Irving said. Rather than creating chaos, as some teachers fear, standing helped her students pay attention, she said. The ones who typically invented reasons to get up out of their seat – to go to the garbage can, pencil sharpener or bathroom – stopped needing excuses to move.

“My students are more engaged, alert, on task – much more so than when they’re sitting in traditional desks and groups,” Nelson-Irving said. “The freedom that these desks have given me in my classroom is just the best.”

The scientific support for standing desks is still catching up to the anecdotal evidence.

It’s not yet clear whether standing at school improves a child’s performance or health, said Stuart Biddle, a professor of Active Living & Public Health at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia.

Early studies into standing desks for kids have shown that the students really like them, even if they don’t end up boosting health or grades.

It also stands to reason, Biddle said, that getting into the habit of standing as a child will offer benefits in adulthood.

“We need to create an attractive environment that pushes and pulls you into different forms of posture, not just sitting,” he said.

“When you sit down, the whole body shuts down and it’s much easier to get poor levels of concentration.”

People who stand are more likely to move, shifting from one foot to the other, standing on toes, leaning forward and back. “You’re more physically aroused and therefore more psychologically aroused,” Biddle said.

That doesn’t mean kids or adults need to avoid chairs, entirely, he said. Standing endlessly can lead to back aches and foot pain - especially in 61-year-olds like him, Biddle said.

But he suggests as a rule of thumb, that people spend at least 5-10 minutes of every 30 on their feet.

Sixth grader Emma Kalcounos, left, credits the standing desk with helping her focus.

If he were teaching classes, he said, he would get students to stand – rather than raise their hand – to show they knew an answer, and have standing group discussions.

Early research into sitting too much confirmed that being sedentary is bad for the body. Now, scientists are analyzing the best ways to break up the sitting habit, said Dinesh John, an assistant professor in the Health Sciences Department at Northeastern University in Boston.

It’s not yet be shown how much people should stand or what are the best alternatives to sitting, particularly for children, said John, who collaborates with Ergotron and uses one of their standing desks in his own office.

James Levine said his own research and others’ suggests that children benefit from any extra time to burn off energy.

“If you give children the opportunity to move while learning, they will do so,” said Levine, co-director of obesity solutions at the Mayo Clinic and Arizona State University. “They’ll double the amount of daily movement.”

The key is not to tell kids to move – some will naturally be more active than others – but to give them more opportunities to move when they want, he said.

Giving children this option leads to a 10-15% improvement in educational scores, better blood pressure and glucose numbers, subjective improvements in behavior, and reduced medication for children with ADHD, he said.

It’s not clear whether that’s because the kids are able to burn off excess energy, can stop wasting energy on keeping themselves still, or feel special because they're in classrooms like Emma's. "If you give kids these opportunities, they latch onto them," said Levine, who recently studied a classroom where the students got to sit on yoga balls instead of chairs.

Levine said he hopes this research will eventually lead to improvements in American education. "There will be a whole new science emerge to start to understand precisely how we can use movement during education to improve education," he said.

Joseph DiPuma, district technology innovation coordinator for Flagler Schools, said that watching the change in Nelson-Irving’s classroom was all the evidence he needed to support standing desks.

“If it were up to me, we would go district-wide” with the desks, he said. “To me it’s a no-brainer.”

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