The presence and strength of state physical education (P.E.) laws positively affected P.E. attendance and the frequency and duration of physical activity throughout the day, suggests a new analysis from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.

“We found that compared to those residing in states with weak or no P.E. laws, students in states with strong P.E. laws had an additional 0.2 days of P.E. attendance per week and spent an additional 33.9 minutes participating in P.E. classes per week,” said Ruopeng An, associate professor and first author of the paper “State Laws Governing School Physical Education in Relation to Attendance and Physical Activity among Students in the US: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” published in the March print issue of the Journal of Sport and Health Science.

An also wrote an editorial on policy and physical activity published in the issue.

Physical activity among children and adolescents has been an indispensable way to prevent childhood obesity and mental illnesses, An said. Currently, over three-quarters of children and adolescents in the U.S. don’t meet the guidelines-recommended daily physical activity level — at least 60 minutes of physical activity every day of the week, he said.

“In the meantime, nearly half of children and adolescents exceed two hours per day of sedentary behavior,” An said. “The gender disparity is also prominent — 28% of boys meet the guidelines-recommended level of physical activity, whereas only 20% of girls do.”

Despite the promising policy effect, state laws mandating P.E. participation have seen a sharp decline by school grade level — only 15%, 9% and 6% of students in elementary, middle and high schools in the U.S., respectively, are required to take P.E. classes on three or more days a week during the entire academic year, An said.

“Our analysis shows that state P.E. laws affected girls’ physical activity more than boys’,” he said, “It is possible that girls are less likely to take P.E. as an elective course so that mandating P.E. increases girls’ P.E. time more substantially than boys.”

“Not all laws are born equal,” An said. “Different aspects of state P.E. laws tended to affect students’ P.E. attendance differently. Certain parts of the laws could be counterproductive — reducing rather than increasing students’ P.E. attendance.”

Based on An’s earlier work published in the American Journal of Health Promotion, state laws governing P.E. class time, staffing for P.E., joint use agreement for physical activity, assessment of health-related fitness and P.E. curriculum all were associated with increased weekly P.E. attendance.

In contrast, state laws governing physical activity time in P.E., P.E. proficiency and recess time were associated with reduced P.E. attendance. “For example, mandating fitness tests could raise concerns and anxiety and reinforce peer pressure and a competitive atmosphere among students. Consequently, some students may choose to skip P.E. to avoid performance assessment,” An explained.

An conducts research to assess environmental influences and population-level interventions on weight-related behaviors and outcomes throughout the life course. He is an expert on physical activity and the sedentary lifestyle.

A total of 17 studies were included in the review, and five contributed to the meta-analyses. Eight used nationally representative school- or student-level data; three focused on multiple states; and the remaining six examined the P.E. laws of a single state.

An and his co-authors, Jianxiu Liu and Ruidong Liu of Tsinghua University in China, found that some states have policy waivers that may exempt children from P.E. attendance in school.

“Some of those policy waivers could compromise students’ participation in P.E. and their physical activity levels at school,” An said. “Based on the available evidence, states should implement strong evidence-based P.E. laws to increase P.E. attendance and promote physical activity engagement among school students.”

Michal Grinstein-Weiss, the Shanti K. Khinduka Distinguished Professor at the Brown School and director of the Social Policy Institute at Washington University in St. Louis, spoke March 15 at the civil society forum of the United Nations session on the Commission on the Status of Women.

The Commission on the Status of Women is the principal global intergovernmental body exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women. A functional commission of the Economic and Social Council, it was established in 1946.

Grinstein-Weiss, an expert on social and economic development and asset building, spoke on addressing inequities through academic, industry and government partnerships. A video of the session is available on YouTube.

The pandemic is exacerbating preexisting social and economic inequalities in the United States and abroad, finds a new study from the Social Policy Institute (SPI) at Washington University in St. Louis.

The study, “Household Spending Patterns and Hardships during COVID-19: A Comparative Study of the U.S. and Israel,” draws on national surveys conducted early in the pandemic to investigate COVID-19’s effects on self-reported consumer spending behaviors and hardship experiences for households in Israel and the U.S., two countries with very different responses to the pandemic.

“We found that the economic relief packages passed early in the pandemic were not sufficient to fully buffer economically vulnerable households from the effects of the pandemic,” said Stephen Roll, research assistant professor at the Brown School and first author on the paper.

Hardship was common during the early months of the pandemic and, while rates of skipping housing payments or utility bills were similar between the two countries, the rate of reported food insecurity in the U.S. was almost 50% higher than in Israel.

“Fortunately, this problem is likely not insoluble — the fact that middle-income households in Israel struggled less than their American counterparts indicates that these support gaps can be covered by well-designed social policies, both in reaction to and in preparation for economic crises,” he said.

Key findings from the analysis:

• Despite dramatically different experiences with (and reactions to) the pandemic, households in both the U.S. and Israel often faced similar levels of spending volatility and hardship in the early months of the pandemic, though food insecurity was a much larger concern in the U.S.
• The countries were similar in that economically marginalized minority groups in each — Black and Hispanic households in the U.S. and Arab Israeli households in Israel — reported greater spending volatility on essential needs and higher rates of food insecurity and struggles to pay their bills.
• Controlling for other factors, pre-pandemic income and employment status appeared much less predictive of spending volatility and hardship in Israel than in the U.S.; in particular, middle-income households in the U.S. fared worse (relative to high-income households) than their Israeli counterparts.

Co-authors on the study are: Michal Grinstein-Weiss, the Shanti K. Khinduka Distinguished Professor at the Brown School and director of the Social Policy Institute; Yung Chun and Olga Kondratjeva, both data analysts at SPI; and Mathieu Despard, associate professor at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro.

New research from faculty in the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis is providing guidance to local policymakers on how they might contain the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19 until vaccination ramps up to levels high enough to provide widespread protection.

TRACE (Testing Responses through Agent-based Computational Epidemiology) is a collaborative effort by researchers from the university and Brookings Center on Social Dynamics and Policy to produce a sophisticated, computational simulation model to inform policy responses to the pandemic. It draws on the extensive body of evidence about both the current and past epidemics.

While previous simulations produced by the model, developed by Ross Hammond, the Betty Bofinger Brown Associate Professor at the Brown School, focused on national containment efforts, new simulations concentrate on how the COVID-19 pandemic might be effectively contained in St. Louis through this summer. Hammond and his team are working with officials from the St. Louis Department of Health.

“Our close collaborative engagement with the St. Louis Department of Health demonstrates the effectiveness of the agent-based computational modeling approach as a decision-support tool to assist policymakers in developing highly customized policies, while managing the substantial uncertainty that comes with the COVID-19 pandemic,” Hammond said.

TRACE researchers conducted approximately 50,000 simulations representing more than 1,000 different combinations of containment policy options across a range of epidemiological parameters.

They produced four main findings for the St. Louis area:

• With current infection rates, existing control measures and the planned vaccination campaign are likely sufficient to contain spread.
• If new virus variants increase, additional control measures will be needed to prevent a substantial increase in new cases over the coming few months.
• Multiple robust policy options exist for increased control of COVID-19 spread, even with higher rates of new variants. The model identifies these options and tradeoffs between them.
• Effective and widespread mask usage continues to be an important means of control over the spread of COVID-19, especially if new variants become widespread.

TRACE is not a forecasting model, Hammond pointed out.

It is intended instead as a policy laboratory to assist in the design of effective containment policies in the face of uncertainty, he said.

“This new work shows how our previous national-scale framework can be adapted and tailored to provide guidance to state and local policymakers and can be extended to help manage new uncertainties, such as the potential for novel variants of SARS-Cov-2 to become widespread,” Hammond said of the virus that causes COVID-19.

“Working closely with the St. Louis Department of Health, we developed a highly realistic, fine-grained simulation framework that captures empirically specific geography and demography of the area’s 2.5 million people, along with contact patterns driven by where citizens live, work, attend school and mix socially. We also characterized local distributions of individual-level COVID-19 case properties based on the most current, high-quality empirical research and represented current control measures in place across the region.”

The Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies has been approved for a $20,000 Grants for Arts Projects award to support Washington University 30th Annual Pow Wow. The area-wide event, scheduled for March 27-28, helps increase cultural awareness and contributes to the richness of St. Louis and the larger region.

The Pow Wow is in its 30th year and attracts over 3,000 dancers, singers, vendors, participants and guests locally & nationally. The center is among 1,073 projects across America totaling nearly $25 million that were selected during this first round of fiscal year 2021 funding in the Grants for Arts Projects funding category.

“The National Endowment for the Arts is proud to support this project from the Buder Center,” said Arts Endowment Acting Chairman Ann Eilers. “It is among the arts organizations across the country that have demonstrated creativity, excellence, and resilience during this very challenging year.”

Like other programming from the Buder Center, this year’s event will be virtual due to the pandemic. Director Kellie Thompson and her team emphasize the importance of creating space for virtual programming to highlight Native culture. For a year the Center has been doing just that, for example, the Digital Storytelling Project was funded to share stories of Indigenous people in Missouri and the three-part Native Futures, Native Voices speaker series, sponsored by the Gephardt Institute and the Alliance for Native Programs & Initiatives, offers Indigenous perspectives on a variety of topics.

“One of the hardest things about the pandemic within Indian Country is the feeling of isolation from our culture and communities. The Buder Center continues to be committed to providing innovative, creative and impactful ways to engage our students and Native community. The Buder staff and student led Pow Wow committee are grateful to be supported by the NEA and our other sponsors and donors to connect people with Native culture, art, drum and dance.” said Thompson.

For event or sponsorship information, visit the Buder Center website.

The scourge of HIV/AIDS in Africa has had a wide impact on all segments of the population, but none more devastating than on children who have been orphaned by the disease. Now, new research has shown that providing savings accounts to the families of those adolescents can help to bolster their physical, mental and sexual health.

The five-year study, which took place in Uganda, is chronicled in findings published in the March issue of the American Journal of Public Health by Fred Ssewamala, the William E. Gordon Distinguished Professor at the Brown School and director of the International Center for Child Health and Development (ICHAD) and SMART Africa Center.

“Findings from our ‘Bridges to the Future’ study showed that even modest economic interventions targeting adolescents orphaned by AIDS can sustainably improve physical health, mental health functioning, financial stability, and food security,” said Ssewamala, the principal investigator on the project.

Nearly 1,400 students in grades 5-6 from 48 schools in Uganda and their families participated in the study. Some received standard care, while another group (Bridges) also received asset-building workshops, peer mentors, and 1-1 matched savings accounts that could be used for education or family enterprise; a third group (Bridge-PLUS) received savings accounts with a 2-1 match. After 24 months, Bridges and Bridges PLUS participants reported higher physical health scores, lower depressive symptoms, and higher self-concept and self-efficacy. Bridges participants also reported lower sexual risk-taking intentions. At 48 months, Bridges and Bridges PLUS participants reported better self-rated health, higher savings, and lower food insecurity. Bridges PLUS participants reported reduced hopelessness, and greater self-concept and self-efficacy.

Ssewamala said he hopes the study’s results will encourage policymakers to improve the care and well-being of the large number of poor families around the world who are impacted by HIV/AIDS. “Policymakers will be able to point to findings from our study when designing quality of care standards for children, adolescents and families impacted by poverty and HIV in resource-constrained settings,” he said.