Ottawa school bans balls at recess
Friday, January 22, 2010 
This week an Ottawa school, D. Roy Kennedy Public School, has been in the news and featured on the Free Range Kids blog because a group of students started a petition to reverse a ban on playing with balls at recess in the winter. Students are allowed to run around and play, but they cannot use balls.
According to the principal:
They’ve got snow stuck to them, they’re frozen, often there’s pebbles on them and they’re flying through the air. One student fell backwards on their head and ended up with a concussion. We had a student with a ball in the eye area, which was very serious.
Let's take a look at this argument:
- they have snow stuck to them: Snow is soft. Snow is stuck to everything else outside, not just the balls.
- they're frozen: If they are kept inside and only taken outside for recess, they wouldn't be frozen.
- often there's pebbles on them: Where are the pebbles coming from? If this is truly a problem, could balls be allowed in a section of the schoolyard that doesn't have pebbles?
- one student fell backwards on their head and ended up with a concussion: How is that an experience that is unique to the use of balls in winter? Couldn't that have happened running in the schoolyard in winter without a ball? Couldn't that have happened playing with balls in the schoolyard in warmer weather?
- we had a student with a ball in the eye area, which was very serious: Again, is this unique to winter? If it is because of the frozen balls, could storing them inside help?
In another article, the principal was quoted as saying: "The balls get hard and they were really pegging each other. The first week of snow, it was like a M*A*S*H unit in the office. One staff member got clocked with a basketball." Maybe rather than an outright ban on balls, there should be rules against certain types of games/play. Perhaps dodgeball with frozen balls isn't a good idea, but a game of catch, soccer, or basketball wouldn't be unreasonable. When I was in school, we played broom ball...with sticks and hard little balls. I guess our teachers were really trying to kill us.
Today I spent the afternoon with my son at the emergency room of the Children's Hospital. His school called us because he had hurt himself playing outside after lunch. The bell rang and he was running to get in line to go inside and pushing the truck he had been playing with back to the entrance to put it away. He slipped on the ice, did a somersault, and landed face first in the icy pavement. His nose bled. He vomited. His face is banged up. He had a minor concussion. I hope his school DOES NOT ban playing with trucks outside because it is an activity he enjoys and that keeps him active and interested, rather than just sitting in a snowbank waiting for it to be time to go back in.
When kids goof off and play, they are going to get injured sometimes. But if we don't let kids be kids, they are never going to learn what their physical limits are or what their bodies are capable of. They are much more likely to get hurt if they never run around, than if they engage in potentially dangerous activities. Our kids need permission and encouragement to play. We cannot let a few injuries here or there lead to a decision that unstructured play is too dangerous.The manager of health promotion and injury prevention at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario echoed this thought and said "you can never eliminate risk as long as there are kids." Rather than banning activities, she suggests looking at the other risk factors inherent to that activity that may be causing injuries (e.g. slippery surfaces, insufficient supervision, etc.).
Bring the balls back!
Image credit: EricMagnuson on flickr
Reader Comments (15)
Hearing about situations like this leads me to feel really uncared for as a child, in a sarcastic sense. We played with balls in the Spring, Summer, Fall and yes in the Winter. Of course a few kids, included me, got hurt. There was limitations on our play. Like you said, there should be boundaries on the play that is done.Then again with the cut backs (here anyways) there is no one looking after the children while they are outside.
I can understand as a parent we send our children off to school to learn. We want them back the way they left. You can't really keep these children in bubbles. Remember climbing a tree, playing street hockey or even man hunt? There is no child or children on my street playing these games. We want them to be safe, and safe is in front of the TV not moving... Wonder why we have health issues????
But back to my point of feeling unloved. There are some things that I did that children now of days do not experience. One would be gym for at least an hour EVERYDAY, oh and Extra Curricular Activities. Here in my Ontario Region we are not allowed to send children with tie scarfs because a poor family had to be called because their child was strangled on the play ground. I am sad for the family, but I remember wearing tie up scarfs, getting hurt in gym class (I was a ball magnet) and I even had bunk beds with two small rails, one by my head and another by my feet. Yup I fell out of there a few times. I learned though, well after a few scraps and bruises.
I guess what I am probably not getting at is when is safe being too safe? Where is the happy medium?
That is freaky! I was never one to play ball-type games (more of a swinging and daydreaming girl), but if they'd banned balls at my school there would've been a huge outcry and about half the kids would've been bored senseless. There were a few injuries at my school--one in which a girl tried to jump off the top of monkey bars and grab onto a lower bar and broke her arm. However, they didn't come out and rope off the whole area because it was too dangerous! Kids are going to get injured--it just happens. When I was eight I literally broke my collarbone putting on my pants. (Rolled off bed, fell on my head.) I was a bubble-wrapped kid, and rarely got to enjoy things like trampolines or pogo sticks or bike-riding off my little street. I still got hurt though, and I think if we keep putting limits on what our kids can do it's going to be hard for them to find and develop outdoor pursuits that can keep them active and healthy during childhood and later in life.
This kind of thing makes me crazy! At our previous school, kids weren't allowed to TOUCH the snow. Yes that's right. AND the principal's solution to the "problem" was to turn a recess into detention to punish the kids and teach them a lesson. It's amazing what schools can get away with. I wrote about it here: http://familynature.wordpress.com/2009/09/07/this-attention-realy-got-my-attention/
At that same school all kinds of balls were banned from the school yard. I think the only balls allowed were nerf balls and maybe tennis balls.
That is crazy! I hope your son is feeling better!
Oh good grief - what to say!!! No wonder kids don't play anymore... maybe we should all live in cotton ball cocoons! I am so sorry about that nose... awful accidents happen and I hope he gets better soon.
I slipped on water when I was a kid and got concussed - LET'S BAN WATER!
And, and, and, I flew off a tobbogan and landed on my face on a slilppery hill. Let's put salt on the hills so they're not slippery!
And hey, people fall on ice rinks all the time! And skates are SHARP! NO SKATING!
Geez, Louise, where does it end, the hysterical response? Most schools do ban snowball throwing, which I can sort of understand in that their only purpose is as missiles, and they can be pretty effective icy little spheres, but even that is a little OTT, really.
I don't recall ever playing with balls or toys of any kind during recess in school. I remember playing with the playground equipment, and sticks and rocks and so on. So, I wouldn't personally feel a sense of loss over the ban. We had fun without playing with balls or a specific object. If we want to encourage creative and open-ended play then a specific toy or prop shouldn't be required.
However, I understand what you're saying about allowing kids to explore their limits. Kids will get hurt, and while it's not much fun it's normal and expected and can't possibly be prevented in any case. So this one rule may be somewhat arbitrary and unnecessary.
If frozen balls really ARE a problem it seems like it should be addressed at a higher level, with a district policy. If other schools don't see the problem, then that may be a good sign that the rule is not reasonable in the first place.
“you can never eliminate risk as long as there are kids.”
Really? I'd have thought a more accurate statement would be 'you can never elimate risk'. There's risk in everything. Kids or no.
I wonder if marbles count as balls. We used to play marbles in school. But I guess kids could choke on them. Are marbles still allowed?
This stuff drives me mad. Like the new study of school lunch boxes in the UK that has led to the question of whether schools should monitor childrens lunches when brought in from home. Puh-lease.
I read that FRK article too. Crazy stuff.
Kids play. Kids get hurt sometimes. That's life and how it should be. It may not be fun when kids get hurt, but overprotecting them is not helping matters.
If those same kids played with a frozen basketball at home and got hurt, there'd be no one for the parents to blame. Would they consider themselves bad parents for letting the ball stay out so long it froze? I doubt it.
That is ridiculous!! If anything they should ban swings! My sister got her necklace caught in a swing chain and when she jumped off it nearly strangled her. Banning recess equipment is stupid. It's not like the kids are playing four square with knives.
@Amber:
We had different situations at different schools. In elementary school, I don't think we had balls outside, but there was a huge hill on the side of the school and we made ice slides to slide down. Those would probably be considered too "dangerous" today. I'm assuming sticks and rocks and things we played with might be off limits in a lot of schools these days too.
In grade 5-6 (we were at a separate school then), there were balls and we played a variety of different games outside with the balls. Some people used them, some did other things. Even when we were playing with the balls, we weren't necessarily playing a defined game with rules. We would make up our own games, which also encourages creativity.
Ottawa school bans balls at recess | PhD in Parenting...
This week an Ottawa school, D. Roy Kennedy Public School, has been in the news and featured on the Free Range Kids blog because a group of students started a petition to reverse a ban on playing with balls at recess in the winter. Students are allowed ...
[...] Ottawa school bans balls at recess – A school principle banned balls because kids got hurt playing with them. As if kids don’t get hurt playing with any other kind of toy. Soon they’ll be banning kids from moving. [...]
/shrug A kid ran into a streetlamp during a game of touch football during one of our recesses and wound up in the hospital with a concussion - and everyone chalked it up to kids being kids. (Unfortunately, they showed more concern over the fact that he had been avoiding a touch-tackle from a *girl* playing - but that's a separate issue.) In high school I took a field hockey puck to the chest from the most aggressive player besides myself in the class, from a distance of six feet - I had a bruise for a month and difficulty breathing for a couple days, but we were playing again the very next day. And those were relatively tame in comparison to, say, my brother on rollerblades at a friend's house, having attached himself via jump rope to said friend's moped and riding downhill (guess how *that* ended...).
I get worries over liability. I get the intense fear that parents experience when their children get injured (my toddler suffered a dog bite to the cheek, just below his eye, at just shy of one year old). I don't get the compulsion to ensure that children never experience injury. There's do no harm, and then there's ... live no life, you know? Balance, people. Balance.
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