Parents urge school board to allow more recess for kids

By Catherine Sanders
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer

Parents of elementary and middle school students are urging the Baltimore County Board of Education to provide more recess time for kids during the school day.

The parents, who are part of a group called Maryland Advocates for Play (MAP), attended the board’s meeting last Tuesday and said children from kindergarten to eighth grade need more physical activity to ensure health bodies and emotional well being.

The parents said young students should have up to 60 minutes of recess a day as opposed to the current averaged recess time of 20 minutes.

Hillary Martell, co-founder of MAP and the mother of three young children, told the school board that more recess for students could lead to fewer problems in the classroom.

“Often if a student is having behavioral problems, the teacher will use recess as leverage,” Martell said. “My son’s recess is sometimes taken away when he doesn’t finish his classwork and has to do his work on the playground while his peers are playing around him.”

Martell said research demonstrates that young children need a certain amount of free, unstructured playtime during each school day to remain both physically and emotionally healthy.

Martell said MAP would like a policy put in place that prohibits teachers from withholding recess from students for punitive or weather related reasons.

“There is correlation between the ability of kids to focus and the amount of play they are given,” Martell said. “We feel it is not appropriate to use recess as leverage to get kids to behave better as it can be counterproductive and harmful to the child who is already struggling.”

The Maryland Advocates for Play was established in February when a group of 12 Baltimore County parents and educators began to discuss their concerns about the lack of recess that their children were receiving from the public schools. The group now has 400 members, organizers said.

As the time has progressed, many parents have conveyed their mutual concerns with MAP on the amount of time that their children spend on tablets, flashcards, or worksheets rather than actual time outdoors.

“My son has ADHD and in the beginning of the school year when the teachers asked him what they need to know about him, he said, ‘I need to move,’” said Jenni Mumford, a representative of MAP and a parent. “He gets maybe 20 minutes a day, once a day and he’s in second grade.”

MAP representatives said that a study done by the National Center for Education found that 32.3 percent of school districts across the country have reduced or even completely eliminated recess.  Some schools in Baltimore County have been offering as little as 15 minutes of recess within a six-hour school day, the parents said.

“Working as a full-time teacher, I see these situations where kids don’t get enough adequate recess on the first hand basis,” said Claire Barnaby, one of the representatives of MAP and a Baltimore County teacher. “I teach sixth-grade and they are even struggling to absorb the concepts learned in class because they’ve been sitting in a chair all day. They’re only 11.”

MAP representatives said they hope the state of Maryland will follow a Texas model – adopted from Finland – in which students receive 15 minutes of recess every hour.

“Compared to their academic scores, it obvious that when kids are given these breaks, they become more successful,” Martell said.

The group’s initial efforts are focusing on the county’s public schools, but members say they hope the idea and goal of having recess broken up into three sections throughout the day will broaden to school districts across the state.