Dozens of students from Avonworth Middle School and Mount Royal Middle School got to work out with ex-NFL players at Point State Park on Tuesday.

The outing was part of a joint initiative between the National Football League and the Pennsylvania Department of Health to promote healthier lifestyles for middle school pupils.

State Secretary of Health Everett James and Education Secretary Gerald Zahorchak were there to celebrate the recent Active School Grant awards. The NFL also was promoting its Play 60 program, an initiative to encourage children to exercise 60 minutes of every day.

Each school will receive $15,000 for Active School programming -- $5,000 from the government and a 2-to-1 matching grant, or $10,000, from a local organization, according to Holli Senior, deputy press secretary for the state Department of Health.

"We wanted to create a program that will help demonstrate that not only does increased physical education improve health but also academic performance," Mr. James said. "We know that the [body mass index] statistics show that 33 percent of sixth-graders are overweight to obese, so we focused on that group right now."

Among the requirements to apply for the grants, the proposals had to include at least 30 minutes every day of moderate to strenuous physical activity for all of the students.

"We were worried we wouldn't have very many proposals because of that criterion, so we were delighted when we had 82 applications," he said.

Forty grants were awarded to schools across the state. In addition to Avonworth Middle School and Mount Royal Middle School in the Shaler Area School District, other schools in Allegheny County that received the grants are Northside Urban Pathways Charter School, Pittsburgh Montessori School and St. Irenaeus Catholic School.

Phil Coffin, physical education teacher and chairman of the department for Avonworth middle and high school, wrote the grant proposal for his district and will oversee the activities.

"We will be purchasing several cardiovascular machines to transform our old weight room into a cardiovascular center," Mr. Coffin said.

The district had a fitness consultant redesign the area in the spring, and it used those recommendations for the upcoming remodeling. Highmark Foundation is the local matching partner, he said.

Mr. Coffin hopes that by providing the machines and training for the youngsters and giving them more opportunities to use the center, pupils will learn habits that will stay with them.

"The center will be open for 30 minutes before school in the morning and 30 minutes after school in the afternoon. That allows students to increase their activity by 60 minutes a day if they choose," he said. Mr. Coffin also plans to buy heart rate monitors and include programming as part of the Active School Grant activities.

"We are trying to promote lifetime fitness. We want to teach them skills they can use forever," he said of the 316 pupils in sixth through eighth grade in the district. Mr. Coffin took the 95 sixth-graders to the NFL event.

Like Avonworth, Mount Royal Middle School also hopes to promote lifelong fitness skills. Principal Eloise Groegler wrote the grant proposal with her intern Lucy Ficas.

"It is our goal to introduce our students to life sports. We already do a lot of team sports, but we wanted to include sports that our students could continue with," she said. The school will purchase more fitness equipment such as stair-stepping machines, bicycles and stationary bikes plus heart rate monitors. Programming also will be provided on topics such as healthy eating, monitoring body mass index and other health-related topics.

Mount Royal received a $15,000 grant, with the $10,000 coming from UPMC.

"We want to incorporate other activities such as a yoga club. We thought that by incorporating breathing and yoga exercises, we can help our students work on relaxation techniques. This can help them relax before tests and help them deal with the stresses of adolescence," she said.

Mount Royal Middle School has about 786 students in seventh and eighth grades. Ms. Groegler took 75 seventh-graders to the event at the Point.

Schools that participate in the Active School Grant will do pre- and post-testing with their students and compare data such as test scores, grades and attendance figures to determine the impact of the programming.

Although this is the first year that the grant has been awarded, Mr. James foresees the grant being offered in the future. "We hope to use this group of schools to demonstrate that increased physical activity can make a vital difference in many factors in our children's lives," he said.

"I'm really excited about it and I know the kids are, too," Mr. Coffin said. "If we can keep the kids physically active and make it enjoyable as well, we have been successful."