Had to go with a cartoon. Highlighting a real fat kid just seemed too mean.Life as a kid is made up of a series of humiliations, one after the other, that pretty much don’t end until after high school, when you finally move away from the same jerks who’ve been calling you names since birth. And then there’s life for fat kids.Being a fat kid in school is the worst. Kids, when presented with the opportunity, will go to great lengths to make life miserable for anyone who doesn’t look like them. Fat kids more than qualify for this honor. So why make it easier for their tormentors? That’s the question we’re asking ourselves after finding out that the Seattle School District plans on having PE teachers weigh and measure kids beginning in third grade as part of a new health and fitness curriculum being put into place this year. The logic, as the school district offers it, is solid: They want to give kids a way to assess their own health and fitness. Part of that process includes determining their body mass index, which is calculated by measuring their height and weight. But the problems if you’re a parent are just as easy to spot.For one, kids are evil. Everyone knows this. And so despite the school’s best efforts to keep the measurements private, you can rest assured that some particularly resourceful little bastard is going to find a way to make them public, thus giving them ammo for the kind of unparalleled psychological torture not seen since the more active days at Gitmo.For another, as much as schools play an important role in a child’s development, the ultimate responsibility for their health and well being lies with their parents. Kids, along with having the capacity for evil, also have the capacity for intelligence. The fat kids probably know they’re fat. (Hell, the skinny kids take every opportunity to remind them.) And part of the reason they know is that their parents probably happen to be fat too.(And let’s not forget the skinny kids who are under the delusion that they, too, are fat. Can you imagine the psychological effects of weighing a class full of hormonal teenage girls? And you thought eating disorders were prevalent now.)There’s nothing wrong with teaching kids right and wrong in school, including when it comes to healthy living. What’s good to eat. What isn’t. How much you should exercise and about how much you should weigh. All fine and dandy. But let’s shelve the scales and leave that up to mom and dad. After all, doesn’t the fat kid have enough to worry about at school?