Located in west-central Saskatchewan, the Sun West School Division covers approximately 25,600 square kilometers. It administers 42 schools, including 13 kindergarten to grade 12 (K-12), one middle, six elementary, three high, and 19 Hutterite Colony schools.
In 2009, Saskatchewan released new physical education guidelines for grades six through nine, and the aims were different and more holistic than previous curricula. “One of the indicators was to determine and monitor personal levels of health-related cardiovascular fitness, muscular endurance, and muscular strength, and incorporate the use of data collection tools,” said Miles Bennett, who was a PE teacher at Rosetown Central High School at the time.
The province mentioned a wellness monitoring system that could be used to capture students’ assessment scores and track their progress over time. Miles began researching different options. After a conversation with FITSTATS founder Francois Gazzano and comparing the product to other systems, the best choice was obvious.
“FITSTATS was totally customizable, it had the new fitness standards loaded into it, and it was a Canadian company – that made it a no brainer,” Miles said. “Plus, Francois was fantastic and as it was cheaper than other systems, FITSTATS gave us way more bang for our buck.”
Prior to using FITSTATS, Saskatchewan schools rewarded students for merit in PE through the long-running Canada Fitness Awards. Miles would test his students every few months, look up their age and gender in predetermined tables, and give gold, silver, and bronze awards to those pupils who excelled. Each school had their own process.
“Before FITSTATS, fitness assessment was a totally manual process that we did on paper,” Miles said. “Everyone was on their own and there was no coordination between schools or districts.”
It used to be that the Canadian Fitness Awards testing didn’t just inform who got prizes in the Sun West School Division, but also contributed to students’ PE grades. However, when Saskatchewan’s standards changed, it altered the focus from achievement to health and wellness. FITSTATS helped Miles make this switch successfully.
“We could customize FITSTATS to our needs and those of our students,” he said. “It was a tool to teach kids about health-related fitness and give them baselines to develop their own action plans and monitor fitness and wellbeing. Every piece of data could tell a story.”
Miles received funding to purchase FITSTATS and Rosetown was the only school using it for the first year. But once he had collected, aggregated, and visualized data for 400 students, he soon made the case to Sun West School Division that all 42 schools should begin health monitoring based on fitness assessments. He soon became the district’s first physical education mentor, providing guidance to students and young PE teachers. Miles also convinced Sun West to extend fitness tracking to every school and started a physical education leadership group. Now, there are two training days per year for PE teachers to come together, look at data in FITSTATS, and find opportunities to improve their programs.
“FITSTATS allowed us to have consistency across our division, created an opportunity for phys ed mentoring, and helped us build new wellness programs in our schools,” said Becky Dubasov, who succeeded Miles as Sun West’s PE mentor/athletic commissioner when he retired and is athletic director at Beechy School. “More recently, FITSTATS has supported our mental health and parent engagement initiatives.”
For individual students, seeing their scores for each discipline in the fitness assessment provided a snapshot of their current abilities. They could then set a goal for improvement and look at the next report generated by FITSTATS to see if they’d hit or exceeded it.
“I had two boys in grade eight who could only do two pushups,” Miles said. “I told them that next month you’ll be able to do four, and the month after that, six. In the five years I taught them, they built up to doing 80 pushups and were on my basketball team. We’d look back and I’d say, ‘Remember when you could only do two pushups?’”
“One of the biggest benefits is the growth mindset that we attach to health through FITSTATS,” Becky added. “Instead of a student thinking, ‘I was born with this finite amount of skill or fitness,’ it proves with data that anyone can improve.”
FITSTATS also enabled sports teams across Sun West to establish targets for all their players, such as improving vertical jump, and then to track their progress toward these as they used a specific training plan.
“I tested out the logs feature in FITSTATS with a few volleyball teams,” Becky said. “It was really good, especially for those girls that went on vacation. They could still train away from home, log the results, and stay connected to the team from a distance.”
While it’s useful for directors like Miles and Becky to present and analyze reports on classes, schools, or even the entire school district, FITSTATS also enables PE teachers and other staff to drill down into each student’s performance and lets students and parents track advancements over time.
“I love the individual profile feature in FITSTATS,” Becky said. “It creates a bar graph of each fitness assessment, and I put that in report cards. As I teach K-12, I have some students who’ve seen their scores go up from grades five to 12. They like seeing their progress.”
“Whenever I showed a student and their parents a bar graph from FITSTATS with how their assessment scores changed, most of the time it went up,” Miles added. “They were proud knowing that they were improving and were motivated to keep going.”
For Sun West, one of the most powerful capabilities of the FITSTATS system is reporting. While collecting data in a standardized way is beneficial, it’s how it is presented that makes it actionable. Miles and Becky have used visualization features to create charts and graphs that they include in reports to the school district leadership.
“When I could show results and improvement for the entire school division in FITSTATS, that opened the doors for other opportunities,” Miles said. “They were receptive to funding other resources. That all goes back to FITSTATS providing data on what we were doing and why it was helping kids.”
Sun West enabled Miles to purchase heart rate monitors to use during running workouts and other sessions. FITSTATS consolidated objective metrics alongside students’ self-reported subjective scores to provide a more complete picture of how their training impacted fitness assessment scores.
“FITSTATS put everything in one place,” Miles said. “We used heart rate technology as a tool to teach kids about rate of perceived exertion, as it’s like a speedometer for your cardiovascular system. When you’re working at 70 or 80 percent of your maximum heart rate, you remember how you feel and know on a scale of one to 10, that was a seven. Then you can correlate that effort level to your improvement.”
In the 15 years since Miles first started using FITSTATS, many features have been added to the system, based on best practices in physical education and human performance and client requests. One example is health monitoring, which enabled Miles to track students’ overall wellbeing with regular questionnaires. A red, yellow, and green color-coding system in a dashboard showed when a student was within or outside their normal ranges so that he could follow up as needed.
“We used FITSTATS to track students’ wellness and mood,” Miles said. “If there was a red flag, we took action, had discussions with the student and their parents, and connected them with counselors. One girl’s parents were worried about her mental health. She started going for walks and her mom and dad went with her. Suddenly, they were an active family and her mental health improved. Her dad emailed me at the end of the semester to say how happy he was that our phys ed class wasn’t about competition but individual wellness.”
“Tracking wellbeing in FITSTATS contributes to students’ overall health,” Becky added. “Having access to fitness and wellness data also helps to guide our teaching practices.”
When asked why she might recommend FITSTATS to another school district, Becky said:
“Physical education assessments are ongoing, ever-changing, and a learning journey. FITSTATS supports that journey and allows PE teachers to apply their expertise. It offers flexibility, but also consistency and structure when multiple teachers are using it. As phys ed and health teachers, we’re the frontline healthcare workers for these students, and we are building skills so they become adults who are lifelong movers and advocates for their health.”
