It says nothing about height. Time to home school. Why does the school system think it is their business.
Remember, BMI for children takes into account AGE. My special needs child is TINY. His BMI was probably zero. He was never even on the weight chart, yet his height and weight were fine for HIM.
And his sister is a big gorgeous 95%. No fat. Just the size of a girl 3 years older.
When the kids get bullied, or diabetes, or have knee problems, who do you think the parents are going to blame? "They see her every day! They should've let us know if they thought something was wrong with her weight!"
Because society allowed the state to make it their business.
Don't get me wrong. I believe in the separation of school and state. Indeed, the 10th plank of the Communist Manifesto is "Free education for all children in public schools." In and of itself, that should have been enough for the good people of America to avoid public education. Nonetheless, here we are.
The phrase in loco parentis refers to the legal responsibility of a person or organization to take on some of the functions and responsibilities of a parent. As a general rule, the public school stands in loco parentis during school hours. There have been several US Supreme Court cases that have drawn the boundaries between students' Constitutional rights and the state.
The salient point is that when anyone sends their child to public school, not matter how good or bad is the school, no matter how much money they've taken in the form of confiscatory rates of taxation, no matter who's on the Board, YOU/the parent, have voluntarily yielded some of your God-given rights to raise your child.
In some locations, the principle of subsidiarity actually works - you can work with the school. Sometimes you get a school that's not too overbearing. Sometimes you get a teacher that works within the confines of the union. My 10th grade English teacher (God rest her soul) turned us on to Ayn Rand and had us read Anthem (now THAT was an eye-opener...right when I was getting into Rush).
The fact remains, if your child is in public school then you have (wittingly or not) allowed the state to have added control over you as a parent. That great 10th grade English teacher can morph into a commie 11th grade English teacher, and you (generally) can't do much about it.
I am fully cognizant of the fact that not every family can homeschool, and not every family (having been financially crippled by real estate taxes) can afford private school (where you may have even FEWER rights). Each situation is unique. Therefore, when I read stories like this one, we SHOULD hold them up as evidence of the stupidity of the state. What we don't do often enough, is remember in loco parentis, and that this is what happens when you yield a little bit of liberty to gain a little bit of safety.
BMI does take height into account.
It’s basically the straight-forward old height-weight tables turned into an equation to give it a scientific gloss - ooh, math - and eliminate male-female differences from consideration.
Explaining how to calculate BMI takes up as much space on the page as the old tables, and either annoys or intimidates most people.
With the tables you can just look and see, okay, if I lost 7 pounds, I’d be in the normal range, whereas with BMI, you have to plug the numbers back into the equation and re-calculate.
Anyway, even if everyone were a healthy weight, there will always be 15 in 100 over the 85th percentile,etc. More math. Does anyone in that school know what a normal distribution is?