• Teamwork gets teachers’ message delivered
Leroy Combs has seen the dire problems in classrooms around our state. Books that are tattered. Desks that are busted. Computers that are broken.
He doesn't have problems with his school-funded equipment being beat up or out of date.
That's because he doesn’t get any. "Any equipment that I get," he said, "I buy myself."
Combs is a physical education teacher, and while he is known for basketball— he was a standout at Star Spencer High in the late 1970s, then played at Oklahoma State and is now the boys basketball coach at Capitol Hill— he has been at the Capitol every
day this week because of physical education.
In this era of education cuts, nothing has been slashed in the public schools worse than noncore classes. Art. Music. Ag. Phys ed.
Combs has been part of the statewide teacher walkout because he wants government leaders to remember that students need more than reading and writing, more than science and math.
“I don’t want to take away from our classroom teachers who are in desperate need,” Combs said as he stood in the fourth-floor rotunda early Thursday
morning. “Let’s face it, math will probably be more important than physical education, and that’s fine.
“But that doesn’t mean that physical education is not important.”
That is a message he has relayed to several legislators this week— funding education means providing for programs that build all aspects of our children, the analytical and the artistic, the mental and the physical.
In case you hadn’t noticed, we have an obesity problem in this country, and frankly, those rankings are among the few that our state is near the top. And yet, physical education is among the first thing on the chopping block at schools all across Oklahoma.
Combs has seen it
firsthand. After a professional basketball career that included time in the NBA and overseas, he started working in public education in 1997. A vast majority of those years, he’s worked in the Oklahoma City Public Schools, in part because the district has kept physical education classes even as other districts have cut them.
Still, Combs doesn’t have a budget from the district for equipment.
Instead of throwing baseballs or softballs, kids in his classes use tennis balls or beanbags. Instead of spiking a volleyball, they learn the technique with balloons.
“Physical education teachers are the most creative teachers in all of education,” Combs said,
chuckling. “We adapt and overcome. Because we have to. Not because we want to.”
If Combs had his druthers, he’d teach more health lessons and life sports in his high school classes. He’d give students who are soon to be out in the real world more direction about how to have a healthy lifestyle. What to eat and drink. What to avoid. How to make physical activity a regular part of life.
He’d love, for example, to bring someone in to teach his students how to play golf. That’d be something for which he might even ask assistance on the education crowd-funding website, DonorsChoose. org.
But right now, he’d have
to ask for more basic things first.
“Can you get me 25 or 30 basketballs? Can you get me 15 footballs? Can you get me some jump ropes?” he said. “That’s unfortunate. Kids are the ones that lose in this deal.”
The kids are the reason why Combs has been going to the Capitol this week. Why he intends to be there every day until the state restores some of the funding slashed from the education budget.
He’s been amazed by the tens of thousands of teachers who feel the same way he does. He has gotten to the Capitol early each day and watched in awe as the floors and halls and stairs fill to near overflowing. Even though the women and men who come teach
different subjects and have different needs, they are motivated by the same thing.
Our children. Combs says it’s a bit like his NBA days when he played for the Indiana Pacers and regularly saw crowds of 24,000.
“Now I can say I stood in the crowd of 35,000, which is just unbelievable,” he said. “I never thought it would get that big.
“It’s been fabulous.”