Hi all, American here. I just saw a post on Instagram from a girl in London about the negative impact of being weighed in front of other students. This is a very valid response to having your weight read aloud publicly in a class of your peers, and many of the comments said that this happened at their schools.

My question: has this ever happened at your school? Not just a checkup with your weight and height being checked, but with numbers being read out loud to other students?

Personally, I would have thought this was illegal, and even if not, it’s very obviously harmful to students’ mental health. To say the least, the fact that this happened anywhere developed was surprising.

14 comments
  1. No. We did have to strip to our underwear in P.E. and bend over for a scoliosis check. And they came around every once in while to check our heads for lice. I don’t think they announced the results to the classroom though.

  2. Yea, it’s why I ended up losing 60 pounds and am obsessed with my health now

  3. Not at the school I went too, and thank god for that because I would have walked right out of class had they made me do that. That’s just terrible, people have enough body image issues. I used to spend weekends at my grandmas house, she kept track of My weight and weighed me every weekend. It was traumatizing. I loved her to death but that really messed me up. Anyways, the only instances I can see that happening in a school setting is maybe if your on a sports team?

  4. I don’t remember doing that at school. We were required to get a physical every year and had to turn in a form about it.

    If we did it must not have made much of an impression on me.

  5. god damn that sounds fucked up. They never did that to me and if I found out they were doing this at my kid’s (future, he’s only a toddler now lol) I would yank him out instantly.

  6. Weigh-ins were daily occurence in wrestling, but not outside the locker room or as part of a class health exam thing.

  7. >Personally, I would have thought this was illegal,

    I think you’d be right.

    Unless literally all they’re doing is announcing the kid’s weight without collecting any other identifying information or medically relevant information, regardless of whether they announce *that* as well, I’m pretty sure that would actually constitute a HIPAA violation.

    I’m also really struggling to see the purpose of doing that unless your goal is to just publicly shame the fat kids at an institutional level.

  8. Definitely not. I have no idea why they would even need to weigh all the students, much less why they would be so rude as to announce it to everyone. I think only the wrestlers got weighed, and they signed up for that whole thing.

    We’d get pulled out of class sometimes for various health checks, like hearing and scoliosis and whatnot, but all of this was done privately.

  9. In gym class when I was in 10th grade a couple times as part of the fitness test. The school would also hold physicals for student athletes. The only thing that was private was the ol drop and cough. Even then you typically shared the room with one other person.

  10. Only when I was in wrestling because we got separated by weight class.

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