The Double Dutch Bus stops at Manual Tech today

You already know, Miss Mary Mack was a ho…

The 3rd Annual Double Dutch Competition is already underway at the Manual Career and Technical Center. Teams from metro public schools have been practicing their routines all year, thanks to a teensy bit of prodding by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which sponsors the program as a way of promoting exercise and battling childhood obesity.

My elementary school playground’s blacktop was always sparkling with colorful beads. Girls wore them strung over the braids in their hair with a bit of aluminum foil crunched at the ends to keep them in, but playing hopscotch and double dutch shook them loose (to the agony of their mothers, no doubt). The rhymes we sung while twirling ropes made the teacher’s aides blush.

But Felicia Safir says that girls here don’t jump rope like that anymore. She’s the Manager of School-Based Services for the Kansas City, Missouri School District, in charge of all of the district’s school nurses. When she got involved with the state’s double dutch competition, she realized that skipping rope is becoming a lost art.

“Some of these kids had never jumped even one rope before,” she says, shaking her head. “We had to show ’em.”

The competitors learned about healthy exercise by starting out the year with physicals that measured things like their Body Mass Index — Safire says that some kids lost as many as 30 pounds through double dutch. 

Today’s jump-off takes place in the gym just behind Manual Tech from 9:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M. Safire coordinated an opening ceremony to rival the Olympics, with  performances by the Blenheim Drill Team and the drum line from Lincoln College Preparatory Academy. Winners will receive an invitation to compete in a state-wide competition in Jefferson City.

Awards will be handed out in a medal ceremony this afternoon. The competition is open to the public, so get down there if you don’t know about Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack, all dressed in black, black, black. (This is the cleanest version I’ve ever seen!)