Author’s Note: This post is written about Oregon’s PE Law, Senate Bill 4, and the challenges school districts face when trying to implement mandates.  Furthermore, the motivation was inspired by a newspaper article in the East Oregonian that was shared on the SHAPE America Facebook page on 8/31/19.  You can read the original article by CLICKING HERE.

Ever since I entered the teaching profession in 2008, a Physical Education law has been considered the utopian policy dream for physical educators everywhere.  For years, the state of Illinois was elevated to a pedestal for the work they had done and what was featured in the book SPARK.  Unbeknownst to many, Oregon has had a state physical education law as policy since 2007.  House Bill 3141, as it was titled then, was considered a huge achievement for the state.  In short, it mandated 150 minutes per week of physical education in grades K-5 and 225 minutes per week of physical education in grades 6-8.  The bill gave school districts 10 years to plan, prepare and to be in compliance.  Unfortunately, there wasn’t a school district in Oregon who didn’t keep kicking the can down the road and hope for days where the law would eventually go away.  I can speak to this personally because I began sitting in on meetings with stakeholders at the state level as far back as 2015 to plan for implementation.  Compromises were made and full implementation was pushed back again and a phase in model was agreed to.  This meant that over a 5 year process, school districts could slowly phase in to the required minutes.  The 2019-20 school year is the first year of this phase in with elementary schools K-5 needing to be at 120 minutes.  If schools are not in compliance, they do run the risk of having their state funding being withheld (this law has teeth!).  This is where things have become interesting.

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