It seems like the past year has offered us one sad story after another about budget cuts to Physical Education, with childhood obesity on the rise. Both Fox News and the New York Times have reported on high schools eliminating sports teams. Sacramento handed out pink slips to an entire department of Physical Education teachers, and then asked regular classroom teachers to come up with exercise strategies.

So it's heartening to learn that an old-time street sport like jumping rope is alive and well. New York City is even considering putting it into schools as a competitive sport.

The start of this goes back a bit. In the early 1970's, in the New York Police Department's Community Affairs Office, detectives David A. Walker and Ulysses Williams found, even in the toughest neighborhoods, kids were still out on the street jumping rope. They got the idea that the kids could be grabbed, early, by the idea of having teams. It might even keep them from growing up into a lot of the negative things going on. With the support of their department, they started building up that idea in the community. David Walker picked out double dutch as the most popular skill, and wrote a book on its history. He traced it back to the Phoenicians. He also found it was brought to New Amsterdam by the first Dutch settlers.

It seemed to them that if the sport had a League, there could be a body to form a consensus about the rules of setting up competition between teams. In 1974 that happened, and it's still going strong: see the National Double Dutch League website.

David Walker died recently, and his daughter Lauren carries on as director.

The New York City public school district is working with the league on a set of rules that will work for competitions between city schools. Some years back the sport went international, and New Yorkers were surprised to learn it was just as popular overseas. The Apollo Theater in Harlem hosts annual competitions from around the world, one of which made CBS television news. See the CBS News Double Dutch Holiday Classic at the Apollo 2007 video.

It will brighten your day.