Year 7 Students Struggling with Heavy School Bags
By Paige Tse
The Health Risks Behind Overweight Bags.
Every morning, secondary students at Renaissance College arrive at school looking less like learners and more like mountain climbers. Their backs are bent, their posture unexplainable, and their bodies hidden beneath their heavy bags filled with lunchboxes, heavy textbooks, and laptops.
According to CK Physiotherapy, carrying overweight and improperly packed bags can change a child’s center of gravity, causing them to experience neck strain and lower back pain. To stop these permanent injuries, parents and teachers have to work together to reduce the weight of everyday schoolbags.
To understand why students are struggling, it helps to look at what they are actually carrying. Medical experts recommend that a school bag should not weigh more than ten percent of a student's total body weight. For an average twelve-year-old student weighing around 70-125 pounds, their bag should weigh no more than 7-12.5 pounds.
However weighing the backpacks of a typical Year 7 student at Renaissance College reveals their true physical impacts. One laptop, a normal-sized water bottle, a packed lunchbox, and three textbooks could easily get the weight past 12.5 pounds, over the doctor’s recommended limit.
Teachers are also starting to notice this problem. Ms. Ryan said, “I think it’s a big adjustment from primary school to secondary, as you have many classes and many books.”
Changing to digital textbooks is a solution, but it might be easier said than done. As Mr Thomas noted, “I think we could use more digital textbooks, but the problem with the students is being focused on the work, not Minecraft or Roblox.”
The heavy baggage is a big problem, but Ms. Ryan pointed out that the school already provides necessary lockers, but students sometimes lack the organizational skills to know how to use them. “I think that the school’s lockers are totally adequate, but one thing that students need to work on is planning how to use them,” she noted.
To find out how serious this problem actually is, I interviewed some Year 7 students about their bags. Year 7 student Herbert Ho said, “The heaviest my bag has been was an 8-9 [out of 10 points], and that night I had aching shoulders.” Another student, Alba Chan, added, “My bag feels like a 6-7, no pun intended.”
For students like Herbert and Alba, who are physically carrying the heavy load of their backpacks, using the lockers provided by the school could really help them. But as Ms. Ryan explained, students are lacking the organisational skills to plan their day.
Many students are so lazy that they would rather carry all of their belongings at once, instead of taking time to stop by their lockers for 10-30 seconds between periods. Resolving these problems requires Year 7 students to build daily habits, such as taking 2-5 minutes every morning to review their timetable and packing only necessary textbooks.
To conclude, fixing this problem at school needs a team effort. Mixing better student organizational skills with support from parents and teachers,encouraging smarter packing, and using lockers can reduce physical strain and make your child look more like a learner than a mountain climber.