Advocates calling for the return of school recess

Remember recess? Making up games, soaring on swings and conquering the monkey bars?

For years, many schools have been cutting back on recess as they try to squeeze more instruction time out of the day. Now everyone from health experts to Ranger Rick argues that it's important to bring it back. Chuck Anderson, principal at Bayview Elementary in Waconia, still thinks his students in grades K-4 need 20 minutes a day.

"Part of the reason our kids are successful is because we give them a balanced approach to everything, and recess provides that," Anderson said.

An abundance of research supports the logic that kids' health, social skills and brainpower all benefit from time to play outside — every day.

But millions of kids aren't getting the recommended 20 minutes of daily burn-off-some-steam time, surveys show, let alone the 60 minutes of daily physical activity that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say children and adolescents need.

Lack of recess means even less time outdoors for kids who already spend a lot of indoor time huddled with electronic media.

"Even if it's an asphalt or concrete surface that kids are out playing on, they are outside," said Allen Cooper, director of state and local education advocacy for the National Wildlife Federation. "They're able to feel the wind and see the sky and birds, and hear them sing."

About 30 percent of American children were not getting at least 20 minutes of daily recess in a nationally representative survey that the University of Illinois at Chicago conducted from 2006 to 2009. A federal survey in 2006 found that 21 percent of schools provided no daily recess at all.

Anderson, the Waconia principal, can't believe that number is so high.

"I think there's plenty of value in that 20 minutes," Anderson said. "Our kids need that break to get up and move."

Bayview's recess area features a large wooden structure referred to as "Castle Park." It also has a blacktop area with old-fashioned games such as tetherball and hopscotch. Students are taught how to play the games during the first week of gym class.

Most states, including Minnesota, impose no recess requirements, according to the National Association of State Boards of Education.

The American Academy of Pediatrics is concerned, as well. Based on its research, the group said that a break during the school day gives children "a time to rest, play, imagine, think, move and socialize."

But recess is worthwhile not just for getting kids out of a stuffy classroom, according to a report published last month in the academy's journal Pediatrics. "Ironically," it said, "minimizing or eliminating recess may be counterproductive to academic achievement, as a growing body of evidence suggests that recess promotes not only physical health and social development, but also cognitive performance."

As is often the case with school facilities, equipment and other education amenities, children in high-poverty schools are less apt to have recess than are children in more affluent communities, the Pediatrics report noted.

One strike against recess, a Gallup study found, was that principals said that nearly 90 percent of their schools' discipline problems happened outside of class, mostly at lunch or recess.

Olga Jarrett, a professor of early childhood education at Georgia State University who's conducted her own research into recess, said that when she asked teachers whether they offered it, many of them didn't, either because the schools were "preparing for tests or using it as a punishment."

"My own study showed that when kids had recess they were less fidgety and more on task after recess time," she said.