Giving California’s kids a break

The challenge: Dedicated time for recess has been shrinking in California’s K-12 schools

As a young physical education teacher in Oakland, Hannah Thompson knew the value of physical activity in maintaining good health. She had always been an athlete, and sought to encourage her students to be active—especially the girls, who often quit sports by middle school.

Thompson, now an assistant research professor in UC Berkeley Public Health’s Community Health Sciences Division and director of the UC Nutrition Policy Institute, remembers the precise moment when she realized that schools needed to do more to make sure that children had opportunities for physical activity.

“I remember so specifically a conversation I had with one of my students who was an amazing runner,” Thompson said. “She was in seventh grade. I was suggesting that she go running in the morning. And she said, ‘Oh no, we don’t run in my neighborhood. If somebody’s running, somebody’s in trouble.’ And I had a lot of conversations like that.”

Thompson realized that many of her students not only lived in food deserts, with poor access to healthy meals, they also lived in places without safe playgrounds and parks.

“The reason I’m so interested in school-based opportunities for physical activity is for their public health value for reducing inequities,” she said. “If you can provide those opportunities in public schools and they’re holistic and for everybody, it’s not just the talented kids who go and play sports, or the kids with money, or the kids whose parents can take them.”

Thompson believes that most educators understand that kids need physical activity, not just for the cardio and all the other physical benefits, but also for the mental health and social gains. Students who are physically active behave better and have a higher academic performance than students who are more sedentary. According to Thompson, recess peaked in the 1950s and 60s, with most kids getting an hour of unstructured time daily. By 2022, that number had shrunk by almost two-thirds.

To Thompson, the biggest roadblock to schools providing recess and physical education, aside from space constraints, has been competing priorities; the lack of hours in a school day to accomplish everything a school needs to get done.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act, signed in 2002 by President George W. Bush tied large amounts of federal funding to a school’s English and math scores, so school administrators started cutting physical education and recess—as well as art, music, and other subjects that weren’t tied to tests and funding. There have also been cuts to programs that train physical education teachers.

“It’s really short-sighted,” said Thompson, “because there is so much research that shows taking time away from academic subjects to provide physical education, or to provide recess, in many cases actually improves those outcomes, and there’s no evidence that it hurts.”

The response: Dr. Hannah Thompson worked with a state senator to support ground-breaking legislation to support time for physical activity for kids

Nearly 20 years after Thompson’s conversation with the young girl who couldn’t safely run in her neighborhood, she found herself in the state capitol in Sacramento, testifying on the importance of access to recess and physical education to a group of California state senators.

“That was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done in my career,” Thompson said.

Seeking to have more of an impact “upstream,” Thompson had left her middle school job to earn a masters degree in public health from UC Berkeley School of Public Health, and then a doctorate in epidemiology and translational science from UCSF.

From there, Thompson returned to UC Berkeley Public Health for postdoctoral work, and joined the faculty in 2021.

In 2023, State Senator Josh Newman (D-29), who was developing legislation that would require California public schools to provide at least 30 minutes of recess every day, connected with Thompson for help.

“I had a strong intuition, along with a host of anecdotal input, that recess mattered,” Newman wrote in an email. “Hannah provided the evidence-based data to turn a conviction into what eventually became ground-breaking legislation in support of the health and growth of elementary school students across California.”

“Good policy is, in my experience, best built on evidence and Hannah supplied exactly that.”

Thompson made a compelling case that, rather than being a break from learning, the unstructured play that recess affords is where a critical component of children’s growth and development actually takes place, allowing students to return to the classroom more focused, more regulated, and more ready to learn. As Newman recalled, Thompson also showed that the common practice of denying recess as a punishment hurts precisely the children who need it most, those who are already struggling to settle or self-regulate.

Thompson also presented the results of a paper she wrote with Rebecca A. London—a UC Santa Cruz sociologist who also testified that day—that showed out of more than 150 elementary schools surveyed in 2022, only slightly more than half provided more than 20 minutes of recess a day. “Schools with more low-income students and schools with a higher student enrollment were less likely to provide more than 20 minutes of recess,” she told the lawmakers.

The legislation passed both chambers and was signed into law on October 13, 2023.

”Now 3 million children are mandated to have recess every day,” Thompson said. “So, that was such a win.”

Thompson is now working on an NIH-funded study that will assess how well the law is working. “Getting the law passed was the first step,” Thompson said. “Ensuring that schools have the resources and support to implement it well is the next step.”