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Senate Bill 216, which requires the Oregon Department of Education to distribute information on backpack safety to school districts, is all about good intentions. Anyone who has seen students staggering under the weight of mammoth backpacks, often hanging off one shoulder, can understand the concern that kids are courting pain or injury with the loads they are carrying.
But good intentions alone don't make for good legislation. And while this bill won't overly burden the education department, it rightly raises the question of whether this is the kind of effort the Legislature should be taking on in the first place when so many basic educational needs are going unaddressed.
The bill, forwarded as a senate education committee bill on behalf of the Oregon Chiropractic Association, requires the education department to prepare information about the dangers of heavy backpacks and provide recommendations on how to avoid injury. The bill also directs the department to give suggestions on how districts can best share this information with administrators, teachers, students and parents. The purpose, according to the proponents, is to help spread the word so that students can avoid back pain or other problems that can result from carrying heavy backpacks or by wearing them on one shoulder.
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To its credit, the chiropractic association has tried to make that fairly easy and inexpensive for the state. It has provided a one-page information sheet - available in four languages - listing tips for backpack safety that the education department can dispatch to school districts throughout the state. In reality, it's not likely to be that big of a deal to distribute.
That said, having legislators pass a law requiring the education department to disseminate information that many would consider common sense seems excessively overprotective. Could schools soon be ordered to give parents information that having their kids brush and floss their teeth is good for them?
Too late. That's already part of HB 2972, passed by legislators in 2015.
This bill is a reflection of how we expect our schools to take charge of matters that go beyond a traditional educational mission. These come on top of requirements for schools to conduct vision and hearing screenings and to identify and train personnel capable of administering student medications. While the state's commitment to education should be broader than just strict academics, lawmakers must also choose wisely which responsibilities schools should shoulder and whether the state adequately funds it.
And it's worth asking whether legislators should simply greenlight information from various advocacy groups to be distributed through the school district system that may not be entirely reliable. The one-page sheet from the Oregon Chiropractic Association claims that 7,000 emergency room visits a year are due to backpack-related injuries, citing data from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. But that's neither current nor informative about such injuries. The CPSC's estimate - extrapolated from data collected from a sample of hospitals - is that about 5,400 people ages 18 and under go to the emergency room for backpack-related injuries. The data itself is even more interesting. While many of those hospital visits involve strain from backpacks, a similar number in both 2015 and 2016 come from tripping over backpacks. Other injuries stem from issues including kids hitting each other with them.
This isn't to discourage anyone from advising parents to monitor their children's backpack weight. And the Oregon Chiropractic Association is free to do so on its own with the information it has already prepared. The only problem? The group has not gotten around to posting it, an association representative acknowledged. That, apparently, is what people think the department of education is for.