Everyone knows a fat kid or two. And when I was a kid, everyone knew a fat kid or two. Some people are fat, just as some people are dumb, some people are obnoxious and some people always seem to have food in their teeth.

I don’t mean to suggest that this is a good thing, but it’s the way life is. Now, public schools seem to feel the necessity – since it’s not like they can teach anyone anything – to prevent kids from being fat.

Of course, they can’t do that either. But in the determined course of trying, they’ll ruin birthday parties if they have to.

At Vandenberg Elementary School in Redford Township, Michigan, principal Syndee Malek has decided that kids can no longer have cupcakes as part of birthday celebrations. Instead, she wants them to eat “healthy foods” and, get this, have an extra half hour of gym.

Now, since Ms. Malek cannot even spell her own first name, I can see why she’s looking for non-academic ways to impact the lives of kids. And I can understand the frustration one must feel watching any number of kids waddling around your building wearing shirts and pants they must have purchased from Redford Tent and Awning.

But as they often do, public schools are falling prey to education mission creep. Rather than focusing on instruction, they’ve now blown right past political indoctrination and landed square on addressing every aspect of your life.

There are a lot of reasons kids are fat, but the fact that they had a cupcake during a kid’s birthday celebration at school is certainly not among them. The same is true for the dastardly cans of pop (we don’t call it soda in Michigan, Detroit 1-8-7 producers) the school officials are so determined to ban from the school premises. The kid is not fat because he had a Pepsi, or even because he has one every day.

The kid is fat for a lot of reasons, and none of them have to do with anything that happens at school. It’s because the kid’s unmarried parent (and this applies to almost all of them) feeds him junk. It’s because he doesn’t get enough exercise (and an extra half hour of gym on someone’s birthday isn’t going to change that). It’s because he’s genetically predisposed to be that way. It’s because he eats gigantic portions at meals, like me.

Public schools cannot change every fact of life, and they cannot and will not change this one. Neither can the First Lady of the United States, by the way. And in the course of trying, they may also be exacerbating a problem my friend and erstwhile colleague Jessica Vozel has written about many times: By haranguing kids about being fat, they make them feel like they are garbage. Especially girls, but not only girls.

Look, if a kid is walking around with an inner-tube for a belly, or a butt the size of a small cow, don’t you think the kid is well aware of it? Don’t you think the kid already has to listen to comments from insensitive classmates, which he or she can hopefully brush off as just kids being jerks?

But no. Now you have to make sure the damn school gets on his case about it too. Great. The next time a fat kid hangs himself over the taunts, or an overweight girl falls pray to anorexia, I hope you’re proud of yourselves for endorsing the notion that they were every bit as worthless as they felt.

School officials need to get over the God complex that makes them think everything that happens in a kid’s life is because of school, and that every problem they’ll ever have can and must be fixed by school.

Teach them math. Let them have a damn cupcake. And solve your own problems before you start sticking your nose in every one of theirs.

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