The playground at the Ballantyne Bowl has slides, climbing ropes and lots of other playground equipment. But on a recent Saturday afternoon, 9-year-old Christian Glynn and his 4-year-old brother Holden didn’t need any of that.
They’ve brought scraps of cardboard and a dream.
“The plan is to use the cardboard to slide down the fake grass turf, because it is on a hill,” Christian said. “So we’ll see how that works.”
Christian and Holden’s father, Ross Glynn, believes playtime like this is important — not just at the playground on the weekend, but during school, at recess. He’s glad the school day is academically rigorous. But he thinks kids need balance.
“So of course, that’s academics,” Glynn said. “That’s, I would argue, always going to be the highest and most important priority. But there’s also the opposite of that — unstructured time with their peers, frankly, without adults interfering, without adults leading the way.”
But Glynn is worried that those in-school opportunities are shrinking. He’s working with a group called “Say Yes to Recess,” which advocates for laws requiring more recess time for kids. The group started in Tennessee, where it helped push one of the strongest recess laws in the country across the governor’s desk. They’ve since set up chapters in 16 states. Co-founder Kathryn Truman said, in many places, recess has been whittled down to around 20 minutes per day.
“It's been a slow squeeze on this block of time during the day that has usually no fiscal note attached to it,” Truman said. “There's no budget implications. It's just kind of an easy block of time to hack away at.”
On paper, North Carolina has policies protecting recess time. The State Board of Education’s “Healthy Active Children” policy prohibits schools from withholding recess from kids as a form of punishment. It requires all K-8 students to get at least 30 minutes of “moderate to vigorous physical activity” per day.
But PE also counts, which Glynn says is important in its own right, but not the same as unstructured free time. Many advocates call for more — the Tennessee law, for instance, requires 40 minutes, and advocates there are still pushing for 60.
And in practice, 30 minutes isn’t always 30 minutes. Glynn says he’s seen that firsthand at his son’s school, the Collinswood Language Academy in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. The 30-minute clock starts right when students leave their classroom, meaning transit time, bathroom breaks and snack time all get counted against it.
“When you actually measure the minutes of true, outdoor, unstructured free play, that’s probably closer to 15 minutes, give or take,” Glynn said.
Glynn has asked CMS to consider requiring schools to start the clock when kids are already engaging in play, which is what the Tennessee law dictates, or to increase daily recess time. CMS didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Jana Hess is a parent to students in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro School District who’s noticed the same erosion of recess time.
“I was like, OK, this isn't enough movement,” Hess said. “It's not enough outdoor time. It is not creating the dynamic you want within the body from a psychological perspective of, you want dopamine release, you want this, you want that, you want unstructured play.”
Recess advocates often point to the LiiNK Project, a research effort at Texas Christian University that has been implementing more recess and other interventions and tracking students’ long-term results. It’s found a 40% decrease in “off-task behaviors” among students and a 10% increase in standardized testing results by fourth grade. Other studies have suggested academic and cognitive benefits as well.
Cathy Ramstetter is a researcher, school health consultant and founder of a nonprofit called Successful Healthy Children, who has spent much of her career promoting the importance of recess. She says recess can help boost academic performance. Taking breaks helps the brain process the information that it learns. And the unstructured peer-to-peer interactions at recess also help kids develop other skills.
“That's their time to practice the things we teach them, whether that's a physical skill, whether that's an interpersonal skill, that's a communication skill, that's a conflict resolution skill, that's a decision-making skill,” Ramstetter said. “Those are all things that we can practice at recess.”
UNC-Chapel Hill professor Iheoma Iruka agrees, and thinks schools need to do more to increase recess time. But Iruka cautions that any broader recess policy changes need to take into account the root causes of why schools struggle with recess. New policies shouldn’t create new pressures for school staff already strained by educational pressures, like trying to meet academic testing benchmarks.
“We've seen a huge loss in teachers, a huge turnover in teachers,” Iruka said. “I want to make sure that it doesn't create other sort of challenges that were not anticipated.”
Parents like Glynn, trying to drive change here in North Carolina, are still in the early stages. A petition calling on parents to advocate for more recess time has nearly 500 signatures. Parents are starting out small, speaking with their local school leaders.
Back at the Ballantyne Bowl, the Glynns’ experiment has worked, and other kids have joined in on the fun, sliding down the hill. Soon, they’re tumbling over each other, taking turns on their makeshift sled. Holden tells me how recess gives him chances like this every day.
As Holden puts it: “I love to play with my friends every day."
