State Rep. Bishop Davidson, a Republican from Republic, presents his K-12 physical activity bill on the Missouri House floor March 23, 2026 (Tim Bommel/House Communications).
A proposal to mandate daily physical activity in public schools squeaked through the Missouri House Thursday after the legislation’s sponsor promised major changes in the Senate.
State Rep. Bishop Davidson, a Republican from Republic, said he will ask senators to remove high schools from the bill. He alluded to seeking additional amendments as well, speaking only vaguely.
The promise of Senate changes helped the bill scrape together the 82 votes — the exact number needed to pass — even as some lawmakers remained uneasy.
“I’m going to vote on a bill that’s in front of me,” state Rep. Kemp Strickler, a Lee’s Summit Democrat, said in the House debate Thursday. “And the bill that is in front of me says the high school students have to follow the (mandate).”
The bill, as passed by the House, would require 40 minutes of exercise each day for kindergarten through fifth grade and an hour for middle- and high-school students.
“Their brain is going to be better and ready for learning in a way that it hasn’t been before,” Davidson said in the House’s first debate of the bill Monday. “Because we would be adding physical activity into that student’s day.”
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The bill prescribes “supervised physical activity,” with requirements for at least half of the time to qualify as “moderate to vigorous” exercise and incorporate muscle and bone strengthening activities. The state’s current physical education requirements and extracurricular athletics would not count toward the mandated activity time.
To allot for the new requirement, Davidson proposed that schools shave off 10 minutes of instructional time from each class to allot for physical activity. He argued that “45 minutes of mathematics instruction with physical activity integrated into your day is more valuable and results in better learning outcomes than 55 minutes without it.”
There is wide agreement among public health groups like the CDC and the American Heart Association that school-aged children should get 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity each day. There are also numerous studies linking exercise to improved cognition.
But those groups do not recommend mandatory programs like the one Davidson is proposing.
The Society of Health and Physical Educators, which advocates for state-mandated physical education courses in its position statements, recommends that schools expand access to physical activity through activities such as field days, active clubs and integrating movement into academic instruction.
Davidson said he drew inspiration from a program Naperville Central High School in Illinois started in 2003. It created an optional before-school physical education class for students in a remedial reading course. The school’s physical education teacher also used heart monitors to gauge if students were exerting themselves, which encouraged students to work on individual progress rather than competition.
Students who participated in the exercise time showed greater improvement on standardized tests, bolstering claims that physical activity and fitness make students more “academically alert,” reported the Illinois Public Health Institute in 2013.
But some reports have distorted Naperville’s gains into a much grander story. In 1999, after Naperville Central High School began utilizing heart monitors but before the optional exercise time was created, the district and other U.S. schools ranked highly on an international math and science assessment.
This has led to false claims that exercise boosted Naperville to international success.
Davidson repeated a similar falsehood during House debate Monday, saying the district “went from the 52nd percentile, once they implemented it, the next year they were the 99th percentile internationally for their markers on how well they were performing.”
He told The Independent he read about the case in “Spark” by John Ratey, who worked with Naperville to study the connection between physical activity and academic performance. The book does find a strong correlation, but it is more hesitant about bolder claims of Naperville’s international success.
But Thursday, it wasn’t the promise of international acclaim that flipped lawmakers’ votes to a “yes.”
State Rep. Mark Matthiesen, a Republican from O’Fallon, said he appreciated Davidson’s work over the week to adapt the bill to lawmakers’ concerns.
“I am moving from a ‘no’ to a ‘yes’ on this bill because of the hard work and effort that representatives put into it,” he said. “And I fully support the bill with the high school levels taken out.”
House Minority Leader Ashley Aune, a Democrat from Kansas City, told reporters after the vote Thursday that it is not common for the House to pass a bill that is widely viewed as incomplete.
“As legislators, our job is to get it right,” she said, “We should be standing for good public policy, full stop. We should not be kicking the can down the road to the next committee, the next chamber or anything else.”