Forget Goofing Around: Recess Has a New Boss
Richard Perry/The New York Times
Children at the Broadway Elementary School in Newark played one of Coach Brandi Parker’s games during recess.
By WINNIE HU
Published: March 14, 2010
NEWARK — At Broadway Elementary Schoolhere, there is no more sitting around after lunch. No more goofing off with friends. No more doing nothing.
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Instead there is Brandi Parker, a $14-an-hour recess coach with a whistle around her neck, corralling children behind bright orange cones to play organized games. There she was the other day, breaking up a renegade game of hopscotch and overruling stragglers’ lame excuses.
They were bored. They had tired feet. They were no good at running.
“I don’t like to play,” protested Esmeilyn Almendarez, 11.
“Why do I have to go through this every day with you?” replied Ms. Parker, waving her back in line. “There’s no choice.”
Broadway Elementary brought in Ms. Parker in January out of exasperation with students who, left to their own devices, used to run into one another, squabble over balls and jump-ropes or monopolize the blacktop while exiling their classmates to the sidelines. Since she started, disciplinary referrals at recess have dropped by three-quarters, to an average of three a week. And injuries are no longer a daily occurrence.
“Before, I was seeing nosebleeds, busted lips, and students being a danger to themselves and others,” said Alejandro Echevarria, the principal. “Now, Coach Brandi does miracles with 20 cones and three handballs.”
The school is one of a growing number across the country that are reining in recess to curb bullying and behavior problems, foster social skills and address concerns over obesity. They also hope to show children that there is good old-fashioned fun to be had without iPods and video games.
Playworks, a California-based nonprofit organization that hired Ms. Parker to run the recess program at Broadway Elementary, began a major expansion in 2008 with an $18 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It has placed recess coaches in 170 schools in low-income areas of nine cities, including Boston, Washington and Los Angeles, and of Silicon Valley.
Playworks schools are not the only ones with organized recess games. In Florida, Broward County’s 140 elementary schools swapped recess for 30 minutes of teacher-supervised physical activities in 2007. Last year in Kearney, Neb., the district had a university professor and five students teach recess games and draw in students who tended to stand against the fence.
Although many school officials and parents like the organized activity, its critics say it takes away the only time that children have to unwind.
In Wyckoff, N.J., an upper-middle-class township in Bergen County with a population of 17,000, hundreds of people signed a petition in protest after the district replaced recess in 2007 with a “midday fitness” program.
“I just can’t imagine going through the entire day without a break, whether you’re an adult or a child,” said Maria Costa, a Wyckoff mother of three who said that every day her daughter came home feeling stress after rushing through lunch to run laps. “It’s just not natural.”
Recess has since been restored in Wyckoff’s middle school, and on alternating days in elementary schools.
Dr. Romina M. Barros, an assistant clinical professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx who was an author of a widely cited study on the benefits of recess, published last year in the journal Pediatrics, says that children still benefit most from recess when they are let alone to daydream, solve problems, use their imagination to invent their own games and “be free to do what they choose to do.”
Structured recess, Dr. Barros said, simply transplants the rules of the classroom to the playground.
“You still have to pay attention,” she said. “You still have to follow rules. You don’t have that time for your brain to relax.”
Adeola Whitney, executive director for Playworks in the Newark area, said that the recess coaches used a playbook with hundreds of games and gave students a say in what they do.
“It’s not rigid in any way, and it certainly allows for their creativity,” Ms. Whitney said. “In some cases, we’re teaching children how to play if they can’t go to the park because it’s drug-infested, or their parents can’t afford to send them to activities.”
Each school pays Playworks $23,500 a year to run a recess program — Broadway Elementary is using a grant from Covanta Energy, which owns a waste-to-energy plant in Newark — and the rest of the expenses for training, equipment, after-school activities and field trips are covered through the nonprofit’s grants and donations.
It is not just about fun and games. At University Heights Charter School in Newark, another of New Jersey’s eight Playworks programs, students have learned to settle petty disputes, like who had the ball first or who pushed whom, not with fists but with the tried and truerock-paper-scissors.
“Recess used to end with bad feelings that would continue to play out in the first 20 minutes of class,” said Misha Simmonds, the charter school’s executive director. “Instead of recess being a refreshing time, it took away from readiness to learn.”
Ms. Parker, 28, the coach at Broadway Elementary, had worked as a counselor for troubled teenagers in a group home in Burlington, N.C. Besides her work at recess, she visits each class once a week to play games that teach lessons about cooperation, sportsmanship and respect.
“These are the things that matter in life: who you are as a human being at the core,” she said.
Broadway Elementary, with 367 students in kindergarten to fourth grade, rises above a rough-hewn industrial neighborhood in the North Ward. Nearly all the students are black or Hispanic, and poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.
There are three 15-minute recesses, with more than 100 children at a time packed into a fenced-in basketball court equipped with nothing more than a pair of netless hoops.
On a chilly morning, Ms. Parker shoveled snow off the blacktop so that the students could go outside after being cooped up in the cafeteria during recess in the previous week. She drew squares in blue and green chalk for a game called switch, a fast-paced version of musical chairs — without the chairs. (She goes through a box of chalk a week.)
Ms. Parker, who greets students with hugs and a cheerful “hello-hello,” keeps the rules simple so that they can focus on playing rather than on following directions. “We’re trying to get them to exert energy, to get it all out,” she said. “They can be as loud as they want. I never tell them to be quiet unless I’m telling them something.”
Jose Salcedo, a fourth grader, volunteers as a junior coach, though he said that he and his friends sometimes missed the old recess, because “nobody would tell us what to do.”
Others, like Khizeeq Murphy, 10, say they look forward to playing different games every day. Before, Khizeeq said, he used to just run and dribble a basketball.
Kazmir Payne, a second grader, wishes he could have his free time back, but his mother, Kizzy, appreciates the more regimented recess.
“It’s better this way because that’s how other kids get hurt, when you’re horse-playing,” she said. “I think the more supervision, the better.”
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