Ours has outdoor recess scheduled for 30 minutes every day but I feel like it's often curtailed due to schedule crunch.

They also do indoor recess during inclement weather and they have a very expansive definition of "inclement weather" that includes it just being in the 40s or 50s (that's ideal playground weather!) or it having rained earlier in the day but is not currently raining.

However these things do seem common at DC schools so I'm not sure other schools do much better. We have friends at a variety of DCPS and charters schools and they all complain of the same things.

Twice a week is ridiculous. I can imagine there are behavior problems at the school because kids don’t get enough time to play/release energy. That is very developmentally inappropriate. It would honestly make me worried that they don’t understand what young children need.

Our DCPS has 2 recesses/day for ECE and 1/day for K+. Always outdoors unless there's inclement weather. (I think they are too quick to call weather inclement personally, but I realize there is a real divide in our diverse community on this point; they are definitely outside 4+/5 days though.

On top of that, we have PE 2/week, which is outside about 50% of the time.

Anonymous wrote:Our PCS only has outdoor recess twice a week, with some limited misc. outdoor time for other things. Feels insufficient. Curious how often your elementary schools have outdoor recess and whether the school has a written policy encouraging outdoor learning.

Only PE twice a week or only recess twice a week? If the latter, that's insane for little kids.
Ours has an hour of recess a day, no matter the weather, PLUS PE twice a week

Our PCS only has outdoor recess twice a week, with some limited misc. outdoor time for other things. Feels insufficient. Curious how often your elementary schools have outdoor recess and whether the school has a written policy encouraging outdoor learning.