House Bill 159 states that every elementary school student should be given a 20-minute break each day. What does that mean? This means that school districts are required to allow every elementary school student to participate in unstructured free play for at least 20 minutes a day. The other requirement is that parents should have a say in how this is done through the school health board. Over the past two decades, as the federal No Child Left Behind program emphasized standardized testing — and schools responded to new safety concerns and shrinking budgets — the pause was increasingly seen as superfluous. In an effort to emphasize core subjects, 20 percent of school districts reduced break time between 2001 and 2006, according to a study by George Washington University`s Center on Education Policy. And in 2006, the CDC concluded that one-third of elementary schools did not offer daily breaks for classes. A bill that would have required a 20-minute break in Massachusetts failed last year, but McCarthy, a member of the Massachusetts Teachers Association`s government relations committee, hopes it will pass this year. “We were very close last time, but then they decided to do a study of it,” she said. “I don`t know what there really is to study, honestly.” The American Academy of Pediatrics also rejected, describing the break in a 2012 policy statement as “a necessary break in the day to optimize a child`s social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development” that “should not be delayed for punitive or academic reasons.” The Hechinger report spoke with two other county families and examined eight other examples of parents who said their children had lost recess as punishment in Minneapolis public schools over the past decade, which were provided as public testimony and letters in support of the new legislation. Last September, when Davis` 8-year-old son returned to school after recovering from Covid, Davis said he had come home and had “complete and absolute depression.” His son told him that he was not allowed to go to recess or special classes like art or sports that day, and that he should instead sit down and catch up on the work he had missed. Disability rights advocates and child development experts say the retention of breaks is a kind of “shadow discipline,” informal punishments that are rarely recorded. Similar methods include silent lunches and leaving children standing outside the classroom. While other forms of discipline, such as suspensions and expulsions, can also harm children, they are officially reported, with data transparent to parents and the public.
In early April, after being contacted by The Hechinger Report, the county sent a memo to elementary school principals reminding them that students should be at recess and asking them to immediately remind all teachers and staff of the policy. In the absence of a state law, the Austin Independent School District School Board passed a policy in 2016 prohibiting removing recess as a punishment. Nevertheless, nine parents in the district told the Hechinger Report in interviews or social media posts that their children lost their break or were invited to take rides because they forgot their homework or misbehaved in the years after the directive came into effect. Lisa, an Austin mother who spoke on the condition that her last name not be disclosed for fear of retaliation from county officials, said her son was deprived of recess when he was in first grade several years ago. In one case, his son told him that if he forgot to bring his homework to school, he had to go outside, a practice he said was common in his classroom. Others have decided to reconsider recess at the school or district level. A program called LiiNK — Let`s Inspire Innovation `N Kids — in several Texas school districts sends kids outside every day for four 15-minute breaks. Texas may have overhauled public education in this cycle during the 86th Parliament, but the legislature did not pause, focusing on funding in classrooms. Texas is ranked 34th in education according to U.S. News & World Report, funding the Texas school system can look like money for a problem with no real correction change.
Recently, there has been growing momentum to pass laws to protect break times. Lawmakers in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and Minnesota introduced bills last year to prohibit schools from withholding recess as punishment. “It`s not that teachers are actively learning, `You should take the break off as a good classroom management technique,`” London said. They are not taught anything about the break. Some educators expressed concern that the offences laws add another mandate to an already demand-filled school day. Anna Fusco, president of the Broward Teachers Union and a fifth-grade former teacher, said Florida`s break requirement was “a good thing, but they forgot where it would fit.” Citing all of these factors, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended in 2017 — which distinguishes play from physical education and defines recess as “unstructured physical activity and play” — at least 20 minutes of rest per day at the elementary school level. In Florida, children in a second-grade class were asked to take tricks during recess after no one confessed to taking money from a classmate. In Kentucky, a first-grader who wasn`t paying attention in class had to sit on a bench next to his teacher and watch his friends play. In Texas, an entire first class had to sit silently during recess after some students misbehaved. After the law was passed in Illinois, a teacher expressed her frustration in a public message on Facebook.
The break, she wrote, was her “detention time” to deal with incomplete homework, behavioral problems, and makeup work with her students. “The children understood each other pretty quickly,” to the fact that the break cannot be removed, she wrote. “It doesn`t matter if they`re misbehaving, it doesn`t matter if they don`t want to do their job.” Elana Ladd, a spokeswoman for the Midland Independent School District, said the district does not have a policy of holding back the break. The district follows the state code, which requires elementary school students to have 30 minutes of physical activity per day, which may include a break or physical education class. In Minnesota, efforts to pass legislation banning students from vacations have been largely led by parent advocates, including Christenson Hofer. His son Simon, 11, said that when he was repeatedly denied a break from kindergarten, he felt “just depressed.” The practice is also ineffective, he added, because he “probably wouldn`t make better decisions. I didn`t feel like it was helping me. However, because alternative disciplinary methods are not applied in the same way, it is difficult to know who receives these punishments or which schools use them most often.
One survey found that 86% of teachers in the United States reduced or eliminated recess as punishment for bad behavior. The Hechinger report interviewed 18 parents and students and collected 60 other examples from parents and teachers nationwide via social media and public testimonies, outlining all the stories of young students who have lost recess time — even in states without laws addressing the practice, but where official guidelines discourage punishment and in counties. in which it is prohibited. “If you go back to the beginning of public schools and the quest to teach kids 135 years ago, they`ve all had a break,” said Robert Murray, a pediatrician who co-authored the American Academy of Pediatrics` statement. This article on disruption was created by The Hechinger Report, an independent, nonprofit news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter. Nevertheless, the practice has long been identified as harmful. In 2013, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a statement on the pause, stressing that it “should not be retained for punitive or academic reasons.” The break, the group argued, is a “crucial and necessary component of a child`s development.” Crystina Lugo-Beach, media relations coordinator at Minneapolis Public Schools, said the district`s welfare policy states that all elementary school children should have at least 30 minutes of break a day and that excluding children from behavior-based physical activity “violates county standards of conduct.” When asked how the county enforces the policy, Lugo-Beach said welfare policy reminders are regularly sent to school principals.