New Haven Independent

If you think city grade-schoolers still have the recess you had - 20 minutes to knock around, make friends, let off steam, trade baseball cards — then you’re living in the pre-No Child Left Behind Era, in that far gone epoch when there was such a fine thing as an unstructured block of time.

The educational importance of an unstructured recess and its value for emotional as well as academic development in little kids led the parent group Teach Our Children, including Nilda Aponte and TOC organizer Gwendolyn Forest (pictured), to bring the issue to the attention of the BOE at its most recent public meeting.

According to an informal and partial survey done by TOC parents early in 2007, only one of 19 schools with K-5 classes — the Davis Street School — answered in the affirmative to the question “Does every K-5 class have recess?” Ten said “no.” Eight said “it depends.”

Many of those “it depends” cited teacher or supervisor permitting, or weather permitting.

Other of the schools, instead of recess, have instituted a stay-indoors-and-exercise-beside your desk program called Take 10! The BOE instituted the program because it knows that principals, strapped to use every increment to have children learn and prepare for the new waves of testing, have gradually let old-fashioned recess become, well, old-fashioned.

Even the Take 10! program often has an academic component, like kids doing the number of jumping jacks that might be the right answer to multiplication questions. Still, it isn’t hanging out. Currently the system has Take 10! in 12 schools and they want to add six more. Click here for a previous article on Take 10!

BOE officials from the superintendent down were sympathetic to the TOC parents, who had prepared their comments after visits with the schools’ wellness committees as well as having done their research on studies showing that all kinds of developmental competencies as well as a lowering incidence of inappropriate in-class behavior derive from playing in the yard in an unstructured fashion.

Here’s some of the interchange between the TOC contingent that included parents, parents who are also NHPS teachers, some kids and BOE officials:

TOC: I’m a parent, pre-school teacher, and TOC member. Every time we take the kids out, the release of stress is so important, they come back regrouped, and energized.

TOC: I’m a teacher at the Helene Grant School. Our kids aren’t learning social skills that they will need in life. Everything is about the CMT, but they are going to be five, six, seven only once. They need this to grow, and it’ll all come together. We urge you to bring back recess.

Superintendent Reggie Mayo: You’re right, folks. The whole social, emotional development piece has been back-burnered. NCLB (ed: No Child Left Behind) has just drained us. Ten minutes for this, a block of time for that. It’s almost like legislation. So we came up with Take 10!.

TOC: Yes, we’ve visited Take 10! schools, and at one school, the teacher has more or less let Take 10! become unstructured, like recess. Because she saw the importance of it.

Mayo: Yes, I don’t mind recess if a school has enough staff and the extra hours to cover it. But that’s not often the case, so we’re trying to expand Take 10!. There are 12 active now, with six in the planning, and we hope to make it available to all of our 29 K-8 schools, funding permitting.

TOC: When our parents visited some of the schools, they found most of the Take 10! things to be very structured.

Mayo: Those who can do recess, fine. Those without the staff who can’t, they’ll do Take 10!.

TOC: Some teachers saw the need for the social part of Take 10! and, as we said, were letting it turn into recess, because the Take 10! program is only physical, it’s not emotional development.

BOE member Carlos Torre: We have the same interest you parents do.

BOE member Richard Abbatiello: I’d like to remind you that there’s also $800,000 set aside for after-school programs, many of which are games, very physical.

The TOC parents, who have had confrontations in the past with the BOE, concluded: “We urge the Board of Education of New Haven to follow the lead of other boards to bring back recess.”

According to schools spokeswoman Catherine Sullivan DeCarlo, the BOE doesn’t have a firm sense of how many schools in the system offer old-fashioned recess because it’s optional. But they want to find out. In an announcement that was in part a response to the TOC recess campaign, Mayo sent a memo out to all his K-5 principals. It read in part:

“The Take 10! program is working and my goal is to expand classroom-based physical activity in Take 10! from 18 schools this year to all 29 schools serving our children in K-5. Where feasible, as alternative physical activity on days when students do no have physical education classes, I will allow schools to explore recess. We have had several practical obstacles to recess, including time taken from the classroom and supervision of recess. Nonetheless, if a principal can implement recess coordinated with Take 10! without taking away from key instructional time or incurring additional supervision expenses, I would be interested in reviewing the principal’s proposal.”

To learn more about Take 10!, the contact is Susan Weisselberg at the District Wellness Committee (at this email). To hear more on recess and other issues meaningful to TOC, email here.

For previous stories on recess and TOC, click here and here.