Here we are in what for me is Maine’s best stretch – August till early October – when we can enjoy bright days and berries and corn. In the midst of these pleasures, it’s hard to remember the days in mud season when the gray and rain went on and on, and even though you’ve had your Florida fix, it didn’t last.

It was late in a gloomy day last spring when even Kathy Sutton, school health coordinator for SAD 43, was feeling a little down. Then she answered a knock at her office door and the gloom lifted.

There stood two middle-school boys, the kind you worry about because they make better mischief than grades. They presented Sutton with a thank you “petition” signed by 200 Mountain Valley Middle School kids. It read: “Thank you, Mrs. Sutton, for getting us the climbing walls. And the bouldering walls and the low rope courses and the fitness trails and the after-school and summer outdoor adventure programs, and a whole lot more.”

This is not news. A lot of our children are in big trouble because they’re too big. A lot of Americans – 60 percent to be precise – are overweight or obese. The statistics are ominous, but warnings appear to go unheeded and the numbers of the overweight keep climbing.

At the time Sutton and Laurie Soucy (Sutton’s counterpart in SAD 21) wrote their proposal for a Physical Education Program, or “PEP,” grant, there were “twice as many” overweight children ages 6 to 11 and three times as many overweight adolescents as there were 20 years ago.

That’s terrible. But how many times do you need to hear that a life of overeating, lounging around and watching TV or playing computer games (an average three hours a day for most kids) will do big damage?

Warnings don’t seem to work anyway. Soucy and Sutton cited a report that states “for both young people and adults knowledge about HOW to be physically active may be more important … than knowledge about WHY to be active.”

Hush up and help. That’s what Kathy Sutton and Laurie Soucy have done.

In the early spring of 2004, in their inadequate spare time, the two health coordinators put together a proposal for a grant for SAD 21 (Dixfield, Canton, Carthage and Peru) and SAD 43 (Rumford, Mexico, Hanover, Byron and Roxbury) that would address the two root causes of children being overweight and obese: too little physical activity and too much food, usually the wrong food.

(It’s ironic that in a region where work and play in the beautiful outdoors and hearty meals of homegrown food are among the strongest traditions, many children and adults are physically unfit and malnourished.)

Sutton and Soucy proposed to coordinate existing physical education curricula and programs for kindergarten through grade 12 with new ones, the climbing walls and hiking trails among them. They committed to testing students’ fitness at the opening of the school year and again at its closing.

Importantly, they proposed a partnership between their two school districts and to support and increase partnerships – with the River Valley Healthy Communities Coalition, Black Mountain, Mexico Recreational Center and others – with the community.

A year after they had submitted their proposal, Kathy Sutton and Laurie Soucy got the great news that their proposal would be funded, in a big way: $484,000!

No wonder those middle school students brought their tribute to Mrs. Sutton. Every school in both districts is benefiting from their labor. We grown-ups can benefit, too: A good deal of the new equipment and trails and programs will be open to everyone in the community.

All of us, kids and adults, owe Kathy Sutton and Laurie Soucy a debt of gratitude for their caring, creative and determined work. Let them know when you have a chance, although they are, as you read this, attending a conference in Washington for PEP grantees nationwide.

Linda Farr Macgregor lives in Rumford Point with her husband, Jim. She is a longtime community volunteer and author of “Rumford Stories.” The book is based on more than 120 oral history interviews she conducted for the Rumford Bicentennial Oral History Project. Contact her at [email protected]