It used to be that the biggest problems of recess were scraping your knee or having a run-in with the schoolyard bully. Nowadays the greatest risk may be to your school's Adequate Yearly Progress rating.
As state and federal standards have been ratcheted up, the minutes allotted to the traditional practice of recess has shrunk in 40 percent of school districts around the country, according to recent surveys. Some newly built elementary schools do not even have playgrounds.
School and district administrators, meanwhile, have been performing a balancing act between rising academic demands and the needs of students to have breaks from their increasing classroom rigors.
The cutback of elementary recess last fall to just 10 minutes a day in Peabody, Mass., triggered national headlines and drew angry protests from parents.
"When I was hired, my charge was to improve student achievement, and I thought I needed to look at a variety of angles," says Nadine Binkley, Peabody's first-year superintendent. "In these times, when schools are being held to very high standards, there aren't many places to look for additional time."
" Schools are being held to very high standards; there aren't many places to look for additional time." -Nadine Binkley, superintendent, Peabody (Mass.) Public Schools
It didn't help that Peabody's schools let out at 2:10 p.m., almost an hour earlier than most Massachusetts schools.
"I would have loved to expand the school day," Binkley says, "We had talked about having more time, but the school committee and the mayor felt that the cost was prohibitive. Plus we would have had to negotiate any change with the teachers' union, and we had just gone through a very heated negotiation. So we were forced to look inside the school day."
What had been an hour-long block divided into 20-minute segments for lunch, recess, and supervised reading became two half-hour blocks--one for additional classroom instruction and one for lunch and recess. The reduction in free time for students was even more noticeable because recess in the previous year often had extended informally into the time slot reserved for reading.
Rushing Play
Not anymore. On one late spring morning behind the K-5 McCarthy Memorial Elementary School in Peabody, the second and third graders crowd the playground. Some play kickball on a little-league-sized baseball diamond, others fill the monkey bars and slides, and still others cluster on the adjoining blacktop. There are a lot of noisy shouts and loud, running footsteps from the children until their 10 minutes are up, when they begin an orderly march to the lunchroom.
"If we could give these kids more time, we would," says McCarthy Principal Amy Sullivan. Sullivan has students go to recess first so that won't wolf down their lunches in order to get outside more quickly.
"Since that first week, we've really just adjusted," Sullivan says, although in some of Peabody's other elementary schools, loud objections by parents made the recess issue more political. Among their criticisms was that in the colder months, just putting on and taking off outdoor gear would consume most of the recess time.
At the McCarthy school, though, even the field day at the end of the past school year carried the message that there's no time to waste. "We still had a field day, but it was a 'math and play' field day," Sullivan explains. Teachers focused on areas in which students needed help and built outdoor activities around them, such as measuring the perimeter of the field.
"We're weak in measurement," Sullivan notes, "so the students also measured their jumps. They still had a great time, and they were learning."
"There's a feeling that kids should be given time to be kids," says Peabody Superintendent Binkley, "but they're also going to be part of a changing society, and we need to make sure that they have the skills to do that."
Binkley adds that in the age of NCLB, preparing these students academically has become even more critical. "We have one school here that did not meet its AYP for the past two years, and there are great implications when that happens. We had to send out a letter to every parent at that school saying, 'If you would like your child to go to another school, we would be glad to arrange that.' Do you know what a slap in the face that is for teachers?"
