Tour de Fitness-Louisiana Style
JiJi Jonas
Advocacy Chair for LAHPERD
Southern Tier Regional Advocacy Committee
Eleven years ago, Kathy Hill, LAHPERD’S former Executive Director, saw a need for LAHPERD to reach out to the parts of our state that had teachers who could not attend our annual conference held in Baton Rouge. Kathy’s idea was to have workshops that would bring the conference to them. The workshops would be called “Tour de Fitness” and we would give out “Tour de Fitness “yellow shirts just
like the Tour de France bike race. Kathy reached out to several National Board-Certified Teachers and Physical Education Teachers of the Year to be the presenters at the workshops.
To obtain funding for these workshops, Kathy asked Rudy Macklin, the head of the Governor’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports to help fund the workshops. With the generous financial help of $10,000 a year, LAHPERD has been able to provide the Tour de Fitness workshops for eleven years.
Seven years ago, LAHPERD established an excellent partnership with the Louisiana Department of Education. We helped the LDOE revise the state physical education standards and then followed up with 13 in-service workshops all over the state on how to implement them into our K-12 settings. The partnership continues with a member of the LDOE attending every tour workshop to provide updates for teachers and sharing new initiatives that might impact our members.
LAHPERD has a booth at the Louisiana State Principals Conference every year. Kathy and JiJi use the booth as an advocacy effort to build relationships and educate principals about quality physical education along with giving out information about our Tour de Fitness.
Our last “Tour de Fitness” workshop was at LSU Alexandria on July 11th with 47 teachers participating. Our next workshop is scheduled for September. We average 2-3 workshops per year.
