$1.1 Billion in Title IV, Part A, ESSA Funding

The news article “Momentum” by SHAPE America announces the $1.1 billion in funding towards the Every Student Succeeds Act’s, Title IV, Part A. The new President of SHAPE America and the CEO talk about how this funding is going to be put to the best use. Physical Education hasn’t, and still isn’t, favorited by many schools therefore don’t get a vast amount of funding. In particularly, there has been talk about cutting PE teachers and classes due to short funding in Montana. This article focuses on the importance towards the increase of funding towards physical education programs. Reading about this huge increase in funding is geared more towards educators and community members versus students. This doesn’t mean that students can’t be aware of the funding importance. Teachers should want students to value physical education and health without taking them for granted. This article is a good resource to refer to when learning about physical education funding.

Staying with the idea that this article can be used to inform students, questions could come up from these students after the reading such as the following:

How does SHAPE decide how to distribute the funding?

What exactly can PE departments do with the money their give?

Does every school get a piece of the funding?

Each of these questions would make sense coming from a high school student. They are questions that should be talked about which connects to the Grand Challenge of “Understanding the American Dream”. This connection might not seem obvious. Money tends to make the world go around now a days which goes had in hand with the american dream. Money is viewed as a powerful thing, therefore having $1.1 billion in funding is a pretty phenomenal for the physical education educators and our world.

The article talks about physical ed teachers focusing on their students as a whole. This community of educators should look at students’ social-emotional development, well-being, and health. In order to accomplish this, everyone has to work together to see the same idea. Therefore we can relate these concepts to Montana Health Education Standard 8.3: Adapt health-related messages and communication techniques to target audiences. This idea is supposed to show that the physical education and health community need to work together to promote health and physical ed everywhere.

If I were to give this article to my high school PE students, I’d incorporate Adjunct Displays from the “50 Routines” book. Word mapping can go a long ways for some people and not so far for others. Either way, this article has one main focus, with branches and details that support the topic. Students would be able to branch off with details from the reading while incorporating ideas they come up with or questions they find on their own. Connecting to the Grand Challenges includes students reflecting on the huge idea that money is part of the American Dream. This also would be included in the word map. Word maps can be made with pictures, on the computer, detailed, short, really any way to get the points laid out, so this would be a perfect way to accomplish the lesson for diverse learners.

file:///Users/ShelbiKusler/Downloads/Momentum-Spring-2018-min.pdf