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Elementary Schools Hiring ‘Recess Consultants’ to Supervise Playgrounds
For modern parents, every summer is a scramble. Beginning in March (or late April, for slackers like me), moms and dads worry how to keep their kids occupied while school is out. For our family, it’s a Gantt chart of swimming lessons, art classes, summer school, vacation Bible school, and a week with the grandparents. Once we’ve logged all of that into our iPhone calendars, we try to find a single week still open so we can shoehorn in a family vacation. (Keep in mind, we live in the Arizona desert and often work from home, so we need at least a few hours of air-conditioned fun so our kids don’t lose their minds and we don’t get fired from our jobs.)
My mom had a far superior method of ensuring my siblings and I got proper exercise, mental stimulation, and social integration over those long, hot summer months. She yelled, “go outside, you’re driving me nuts!” We’d dutifully scatter on our bikes, my brother to the local library, my sister to one of her giggling friends’ homes, and me into the deserts ringing Phoenix where I would jump ditches with my Mongoose BMX bike, build forts, and get into epic dirt-clod fights with my fellow prepubescent ne’er-do-wells.
Not surprisingly, I was the kid who needed a trip to the ER every summer, but that jerk Bobby Kelly needed to know he wasn’t the only one stupid enough to jump his bike over Mr. Prather’s prickly pear cactus. (I almost made it, too!)
Thankfully, parenting has evolved from the dark days of kids entertaining themselves. Now children are blessed with tightly supervised activities, scheduled playdates, and structured fun. This not only extends to summer activities, but even recess is being taken over by adults with Day-Timers. To ensure children blow off steam in a conflict-free, developmentally appropriate way, two Edina, MN elementary schools have hired a recess consultant.
Some parents have welcomed the arrival of the firm Playworks, which says recess can be more inclusive and beneficial to children if it’s more structured and if phrases like, “Hey, you’re out!” are replaced with “good job” or “nice try.”
But some of the kids at Concord and Normandale Elementary say they are confused, or that the consultants are ruining their play time.
“The philosophy of Playworks does not fit Concord,” said Kathy Sandven, a parent of twin boys who attend the school. “It is a structured philosophy — an intervention philosophy — not allowing kids for free play.”
The two schools have joined a growing number of districts that have hired consultants to remake the playground experience into more structured and inclusive play time. The games and activities, like four square and jumping rope, are overseen by adults and designed to reduce disciplinary problems while ensuring that no children are left out.
The Playworks “recess initiative” cost the school district about $30K and it is spreading. The firm has programs in 20 states and the District of Columbia, and is now “the leading national nonprofit leveraging the power of play to transform children’s social and emotional health.”
Maybe the best way to leverage the power of play is to let kids ride a seesaw for 15 minutes, free of clipboard-wielding busybodies lecturing them about positive body image and trans-inclusivity. My question to former kids: Has “structured play” gone too far and what can we do to reverse the trend?
Published in Culture, Education
I agree with everything you’ve said.
In addition, I can’t help wondering if there is a concern over lawsuits: “You failed to protect my child from so-and-so or thus-and-such” or “You failed to protect my child from Bully X.”
I fear for kids under the let’s-protect-kids-from-bullying mania. I think it will result in many false accusations and many kids being scarred for life. Meanwhile the real bullies will get away with whatever it is they are doing to torment other kids.
Homeschooling looks like the best option for most parents.
Never could imagine sitting down with people who made middle school hell for me. The jerks in high school are nothing to me, though I might enjoy reading their obituaries.
It did have the admirable effect of burning every last shred of liberal hippy peace from my soul. Violence solves everything… just rarely in a satisfactory way. Violence is fundamentally where power is derived from. Being a nice guy is how you honor nice people, against jerks it just gets you used as their slave.
There is, I think, one decent argument against home schooling. That’s ‘socialisation’ with other kids. But now, it seems, ‘socialisation’ will come to mean ‘playing as instructed’.
MAN WITH THE AXE
May we presume that as a Recess Consultant, you will be sporting the Axe?
When my kids were still in the Italian public schools, they were almost never taken outside for recess. The teacher apparently announced that outdoor play was “for babies.” However, when they were taken out, there was no running allowed. Somebody might fall down!
I went through the majority minority public schools in a D.C. suburb and we had daily recess. I can remember many disciplinary problems in class, but not a single one during recess. Things occasionally got rough and then kids would be separated. End of story.
My husband and I are both former school teachers. We have been homeschooling our daughter (11) for the last three years. If “socialization” means interacting with and learning to behave like a significant percentage of the children we have taught, then frankly we would prefer her not to be “socialized.”
She actually is more “socialized” now than ever before. The flexibility of our schedule permits her time to do many things that would be difficult to fit into an after-school schedule. She interacts with children and adults of a variety of ages/backgrounds at swim club, horseback riding, American Heritage Girls, and violin lessons. She takes classes at the local zoo and museum and meets up with other homeschooling families for field trips and recreation at the park.
Like many homeschool parents, we often joke that we have days when we wish our out-going, chatty pre-teen was a little less “socialized.”
One of my daughters home schooled her sons, and they were involved with other youngsters in so many activities I couldn’t keep up with them. One was also involved with a children’s theater group, the other with a NASA group and camps. It is a rare home schooled child that lacks socialization.
As long as they have the means to hire consultants to run recess I don’t want to hear anyone involved in education talking about how they’re underfunded.
One of the reasons we homeschooled our three was for the better social life.
I homeschool, and I have five tadpoles still at home.
This afternoon, after they got their lunches, I kicked the seven year old, the nine year old, and the twelve year old out of the house and lay down and took a nap. The sixteen year old and the fourteen year old took a five mile bike ride. Papa Toad works from home, so there was a conscious adult on the premises, but they didn’t bother me til after 2.
I’d love to find out what the salary is of the paid playground consultants.
Their company website indicates they are already in lots of schools.
First, what Sawatdeeka said. A school might be doing this because they have a problem that seems beyond their creativity to solve. Sometimes, just having an increased number of involved adults on the field can help. If they’re focusing on students that need help, they could actually help. If they’re targeting specific problems (like lining up, a game that always goes haywire, etc.), they could actually help. I am sure there are real children who are genuinely more functional because of this group
That said even for those with a problem, it’s an over-the-top and expensive approach. For the rest, if it isn’t broken don’t fix it!
Moreover… I highly recommend scrolling through the website, if you want to get a taste for their approach. It’s painful in parts. Read their little lesson plan on how to play tag. Alternatively, you could title it “how to make something simple into something complicated.”
I’ve always wondered about recess: do schools where teachers supervise their own students’ recess have different results from those who turn several classes outside under the supervision of some rotating schedule of teachers and/or aides? Sometimes the people who know the students best see and understand things another adult wouldn’t.
On reflection, rather than ‘decent argument’ I probably should have written ‘possibly plausible’ argument. In fact, I think the whole socialisation thing is a rationalisation. Throughout virtually all of human existence, barring only the past century and a bit, the young have spent nearly all their time with their parents — in the home, in the field, in the trade.
In a sense, home schooling is likely the more ‘natural’ way to bring up children.
If you can swing it.
Incidentally, Bryan Caplan over at Econlog is home schooling his boys.
I have noted before here that some of the most valuable lessons our son (now 27 years old) learned in elementary school were from negotiating the playground at recess. Particularly at a function that brought students from a couple of different schools together. The students realized that each school had its own “rules” for particular games (our son’s favorite was handball), and the leader of the program would not arbitrate what the rules were for the combined program, so the children figured it out themselves.
He uses those skills today in his work environment, where figuring out how to work with people different from himself is considered an important objective.
Here is a good article on the importance of roughhousing and true free play.
From the last paragraph:
Take what happened to Drew Johnson, now a freshman in high school, when he was a child at Cumberland Elementary School in Fishers, Indiana. One fall recess he bent over and picked some dandelions. For that offense, he served several days of lunchtime detention. When his shocked parents asked the principal what was wrong with such innocuous behavior, she explained that some kids had been throwing rocks at recess. To make things easy on recess monitors, the school had simply banned picking anything up from the ground — flowers included.