Gov. Brian Kemp on Monday signed into a law a requirement that Georgia’s elementary schools schedule daily recess for students in kindergarten through fifth grade.
The new law doesn’t say how much recess time students should have. Kemp vetoed a bill three years ago that urged schools to provide an average of 30 minutes of recess per day.
His signature on House Bill 1283 is a legislative victory for Rep. Demetrius Douglas, D-Stockbridge, who has been calling for a recess mandate for five years. The former Georgia Bulldogs football player is concerned about obesity among children.
It’s also a victory for children who backed him on prior measures, even if they’re now too old to benefit.
Pierce Mower, 14, once wrote a letter to his Atlanta elementary school principal asking for recess more than three days a week: “Will you please let us have recess every day? If you don’t my head will explode,” his letter said.
Then, in third grade, he testified at a 2017 state House committee hearing for a recess bill Douglas sponsored. He returned to support Douglas’ attempt to get another bill passed in 2019.
“I was a little kid and recess was everything,” Pierce, who will be starting high school in the fall, said in a recent interview. “Now, as a teenager, you don’t really think about it as much.”
Credit: CONTRIBUTED
Credit: CONTRIBUTED
Local school boards will now be required to file their recess policies through middle school with the Georgia Board of Education. The policies must say whether breaks can be withheld for disciplinary or academic reasons.
The new law also allows recess to be waived on days when students have physical education or other “structured activity time,” such as games led by a teacher. It also can be skipped for scheduling conflicts, bad weather, field trips or other unavoidable obstacles.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that recess benefits children socially and emotionally and also helps them focus in the classroom. Proponents of Douglas’ recess bills say kids need time to play and relax.
Credit: TY TAGAMI/AJC
Credit: TY TAGAMI/AJC
Olga Jarrett, a retired Georgia State University education professor, was among those who testified at the Capitol with Pierce and other students in 2017. She said by email after HB 1283 passed that she still hopes for a half hour of mandatory recess per day, without an exception for punishment.
But she said she appreciates Douglas’s repeated attempts to get a law passed and “can understand that he figured some recess was better than none.”
Douglas said on the House floor on April 4, in the last hour or so of the legislative session, that he’d worked with Kemp to avoid a veto on this version of the recess legislation.
One school district observed that the legislation doesn’t appear to require much.
“This is more of a spirit of recess bill than an attack on local control and on the scheduling of your calendar,” Mike McGowan, chief of staff in the Cherokee County School District, told his school board last month.
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