IN THE CLASSROOM:Healthy Choices Week addresses eating ‘epidemic’

Sherri Fenn has some real issues with fast food.

The Woodland Elementary School first-grade mother, a board member of the school’s Parent Faculty Organization, did an experiment in which she purchased a McDonald’s Happy Meal and left it out in her garage — seven months ago. Since then, she said, the burger and fries haven’t visibly aged a day, and she’s shown them to students to demonstrate the preservatives in fast food.

Now, Fenn is taking her activism to a whole new level. While older students across America hold anti-drug programs for Red Ribbon Week, Fenn has organized Woodland’s first annual Healthy Choices Week — in which the drugs to be avoided are fat, sugar and cholesterol, among others.

“We’re facing epidemic proportions of obesity and diabetes in children,” Fenn said. “We have to make changes, and if the changes don’t start in home and school, we have problems.”

On Monday, Woodland kicked off Healthy Choices Week by creating a giant banner in the multipurpose room. Each student on the campus, which covers kindergarten through the second grade, made a cutout of his or her hand and pasted it onto a blue tarp featuring the words “Woodland Kids Give a Hi-5 to Healthy Lives.”

Each day of the week will spotlight a different aspect of personal health; among the upcoming activities are a canned food drive for the poor and a day of exercise classes. The PFO purchased copies of the book “Eat Healthy, Feel Great” — which rates the nutritional value of different foods — for every teacher at the school.

Second-grader Kean Diedrich, 8, said that long before Monday morning his parents had drilled him in the fine points of dieting.

“Even before I got to Woodland, I almost never had a single sweet in my lunch,” Kean said. “I had almost nothing but organic stuff.”

Classmate Elisha Bernard, 7, agreed with Fenn that fast food didn’t always lead to healthy living.

“You can have it once in a while, but not every day,” he said.