Watching the 18 girls lining up to run across the playground at Pulaski Heights Elementary School, any adult can see how different they all are.
Tall, short - obviously, bodies vary in a group whose ages range from 9 to 11. But also, some are watchful, others bouncy, some gleeful; others look a little cold. There’s a lot of squealing and clinging.
But what do the girls see? Answering that question explains why the Charlotte, N.C., nonprofit Girls on the Run International has a new council in central Arkansas.
As the organization’s founder, Molly Barker, told the Clinton School of Public Service in November 2012, the group’s aim is to help girls avoid putting themselves into “this place we call ‘the girl box,’ and it happens to girls around middle school, where really, no matter what is being shared with them or said to them, what they hear is ‘I’m not good enough.’”
Girls with poor self-awareness are more likely to drink or do drugs, have sex, be bullied and become bullies, develop eating disorders … and these awful things typically take root in middle school.
And so Girls on the Run aims to reach girls before middle school.
Through a program of thoughtful chats and fitness conditioning, adult leaders try to equip them with tools so these girls can interpret the world in ways that result in healthy self-esteem and compassion.
Today this means lining up on the chilly playground. Bella Kerby, Miri Leonard and Lucy Dugan, all 9-year-olds, have obediently sorted themselves into place in front of their council director and coach, Dr. Jenny Johnson Paul. The other girls jostle eagerly into order behind them.
At first everyone listens as Paul explains that today’s workout is a celebration: After three months of twice-weekly after-school meetings, they are as ready as they can be for the 5K they plan to run Nov. 22 on the Big Dam Bridge. So now they will honor each member of their team.
For starters, one by one, they will sprint about 50 feet across the dirt, exchange a high-five with an adult coach, dietitian Mary Cole Wells, and then run back and slap the hand of the next girl in line.
Peeking out from her warm pink hoodie, Lucy pulls her hands out of her armpits and leans around tiny Miri to watch as Bella charges at Coach Mary. Bella’s pigtails bounce; her fluffy red tutu of a skirt flutters; she pumps her arms and lifts high her knees, which are covered in black and white dotted tights.
Miri glances up as Paul starts a chant and then, immediately, she picks it up:
“Let’s go, Bella, Let’s go!” clap clap spreads down the line. When Miri runs, she looks determined.
“Let’s go, Miri! Let’s go!” Clap clap.
When it’s her turn, Lucy has some problem with shoelaces while racing back to slap the hand of 10-year-old Sophia Bondurant, but she corrects herself midstride, deciding not to stop.
“Let’s go, Lucy! Let’s go!” Clap clap.
Sophia is paying attention; she waits for a nod from Paul before she runs. Eleven-year old Anna Spollen springs straight up and tucks her knees, both feet easily three feet off the ground. Meanwhile, way in the back, 11-year-old Sarah Heverling screws up her face to study a pale purple ball stuck high, high up in a tree. She closes first one eye, then the other.
As the chance to be cheered moves down the line, girls double over to stomp their feet for the clap clap, and making noise takes on a purpose unrelated to empowering whichever little girl’s headed toward Wells; whooping and shrieking sound a lot alike at such a high pitch. But to the girl running, it’s all applause.
CONFIDENCE
During another celebration activity, each girl is to sit in a folding chair with her back to the team lined up about 40 feet away. One by one, teammates dash across the field to whisper a private word in her ear.
“Say something unique about that person, something that you’ve learned about that person during Girls on the Run and something that makes her special,” Paul says. “She’s not going to turn around.”
But 18 girls is a lot of girls, and waiting their turn exceeds even the most analytical child’s attention span. The line grows ragged, and anyone not next in line for the chair might be playing chase or pretending she’s a pony.
Sarah to Miri: “What’s the point of this game?”
Miri: “To appreciate them.”
As 4 p.m. approaches and several girls still haven’t had their ears filled with positive whispers, Paul decides to finish the chair activity at their next workout.
But meanwhile, Stephanie Castillo, 11, confides that sitting in the chair was “really nice because people came up to me and said very beautiful things to you, and it felt really great.”
What were some of the words she heard? “‘Beautiful,’ ‘been a great friend,’ ‘being pretty,’ ‘like your clothes.’”
She especially liked it when her sister, Brianna, who is 9, told her she was beautiful. These girls are new to the school; Girls on the Run has made them feel welcome.
COMMUNITY EFFORT
If the name Girls on the Run rings a bell, perhaps you noticed news reports that President Obama awarded the organization the nation’s 4,999th Points of Light award in July. Or you might know that Northwest Arkansas has had a thriving Girls on the Run council since 2003.
Or it could be you remember that in central Arkansas, Marna Franson and Amy Clements tried to start one in 1999 and 2000 while they were stay-at-home moms. Barker, who founded the organization in Charlotte, N.C., in 1996, came to Little Rock to train them. Their group had 12 adult leaders and led three sessions, two at the Heflin YMCA in North Little Rock and one at Woodruff Elementary School in Little Rock.
Franson loved the curriculum, but “there was not a lot of structure to the national organization at the time, and Amy and I were not really ready to leap in and develop a nonprofit and run a business,” she says.
Today the national organization offers leaders more help. It boasts 55,000 volunteers serving more than 130,000 girls a year in more than 200 cities across the nation and in Canada, and it trains these leaders.But still, starting a council is not like agreeing to lead a Girl Scout troop (daunting though that can be).
Paul and her friends have created a legal 501(c)(3) nonprofit, with officers, a board of directors, fundraising imperatives, insurance. (She, Wells and their fellow coach, Sarah Harvey Olney, a physical therapist, all have girls too young to participate in Girls on the Run.)
Paul has wanted to be part of Girls on the Run since reading about it more than a decade ago while she was in medical school. But through years of residency, marriage to a surgeon, moves, clinical hours, motherhood, there wasn’t time. Finally, with the birth of her third child, she gave up seeing patients, and now she has time.
When Barker spoke at the Clinton School, Paul had just filed her intention to create a council. She and Olney attended a two-day seminar in North Carolina that covered a humbling range of business topics. “We got notification that our application was accepted the last day of February and went to training in April,” Paul says. “It was a crazy spring.”
Local businesses and the Little Rock Road Runners Club made donations that allows the council to offer scholarships.
“It costs about $150 to put on the program for a girl,” Paul says, but families can apply for discounts based on household income. “We have girls on our team who pay full tuition and their parents are able to make an extra donation, and we have girls that are on full scholarship and everything in between, and nobody knows except for myself who is what.”
The council plans to expand. While negotiations aren’t final, she expects there will be Girls on the Run groups at two Little Rock public schools and also at a nonschool site this spring.
EXCEPT THE RUNNING
If you ask the girls what Girls on the Run is (as they dash or sidle up to the tape recorder, extroverts pressing, introverts watching), some of their quotations suggest they have been paying attention.
For instance, “Sophia, what is Girls on the Run?”
“Girls on the Run is like every Tuesday and Thursday we meet in the art room, which is upstairs. It has a blue-and-white checked floor right near all of the three fifth-grade classrooms. Sometimes we do stuff in the art room before we go outside, but sometimes we don’t, like today. When we come outside we do fun stuff that makes us … uh .… It’s kind of like running but we’re doing it for fun - ”
“Don’t forget the healthy stuff,” Takia Hampton, 11, chimes in.
Oh yeah, Sophia’s face says, and she bends over the recorder and shouts: “And we always have snacks like veggie straws today. … And another thing I wanted to tell you was most of us are very good at gymnastics.”
Not everybody, and today’s first snack was grapes, but never mind. Her point is she feels empowered to explain this program.
Aubrey McCabe, 9: “Girls on the Run was meant for us to feel like we can achieve something. The founder of Girls on the Run took her feelings on running, because it made her feel better, and so she started Girls on the Run to where we could make ourselves feel like we’re a lot better than we might think we are. We do it by running around the tracks, and at the end we’re going to have a 5K.”
Libby Roxburgh, 9: “It’s about where you learn to express yourself in a different way than other people. It’s also teaching you to help stay active and healthy at the same time.”
Tell Lucy that you’ve heard the girls have classroom lessons as well as snacks, and she pauses for a beat, thinking: “Not that kind of lessons, no. We just learn about qualities and stuff -”
Sarah shouts, “It’s awesome!”
“Except for the running part,” Lucy agrees, nodding solemnly.
More information about the central Arkansas council of Girls on the Run is at gotrcentralark.org.
ActiveStyle, Pages 27 on 12/02/2013