By Khalida Sarwari
Big shimmering bubbles wafting over the black pavement on the playground is a common sight during lunchtime at Foothill Elementary School most days, as are hula hoops, tetherballs, board games and big bouncy balls. Third-grader Addison Orlando likes the ball-on-spoon game the best.
“Sometimes when my friends are mean to me or whenever I’m lonely, I just go there,” said the 9-year-old Gilroy resident. “There’s a lot of people that need help–like they don’t have a lot of friends–so I just play with them.”
By “there,” Addison means Playground Pals Bus Stop, a program that was started in 2012 by Karen Smyrl, a special education teacher at Foothill, to encourage students to participate in activities regardless of their gender, size or ability. The program is offered at Foothill during lunch recess every Monday, Tuesday and Thursday.
The purpose of Playground Pals, according to Smyrl, is to provide a wide variety of games and activities for the students to participate in that focus on health, fitness and positive socialization. The activities run the gamut from the solitary to the social, from a quiet reading corner to playground activities such as jump rope, bubbles, chalk, hula hoops, board games, art activities and group games.
“It’s hard sometimes for our kids to have friends, engage with friends or find friends, so this really helps them to find a place to go to and have fun at recess and have a place to feel safe,” said Smyrl. “This program is especially helpful to students with special needs, allowing them to feel more comfortable during unstructured times such as recess.”
The idea sprang out of the “Buddy Bench” concept where schools around the world are installing actual benches on the playground and encouraging kids to sit on them when they’d like to be invited to play with classmates. Foothill is fundraising toward the installation of its own buddy bench sometime next year, said Smyrl.
Playground Pals has four main objectives: provide a safe place for students to go to if they feel alone and cannot find anyone to play with, decrease conflict and reduce the incidence of playground bullying, increase physical activity and provide a leadership opportunity for students.
To fulfill that last objective, fourth- and fifth-graders are voluntarily trained as mentors to the younger kids. At any one time, there are two to three monitors on the playground, recognizable by their red or black caps. They supervise the younger students’ play, lend a helping hand where needed and occasionally help resolve conflicts.
Fourth-grader Minh Do is a monitor leader who loves the program so much he enlisted his mother to sign up as a parent volunteer.
“I like playing with all the kids, seeing them have someone to play with and seeing them with a smile on their face,” said the 9-year-old. “It makes them feel very, very close to me.”
Parent volunteers are also brought into the fold by helping to set up the activity stations prior to recess and coming up with different games and activities for students.
Josephine Liu, a stay-at-home mother, dedicates about one day a week to Playground Pals. She has a second- and a fourth-grader in the program. The incentive for her, she said, is “to see that none of the kids are excluded.”
“It provides a lot of kids who might feel new to the community, to the campus, who don’t have a friend…a place to go and to have friends who share the same interests and who feel comfortable to be a part of something they’re playing,” Liu said.
Ruchi Joshi, the mother of a special ed student who she said finds it hard to make friends, was involved in the formation of Playground Pals. She said she wants to see the program expand to other schools and districts.
“The moment you have a program like this, you start thinking differently,” she said. “I think you just look at it in a very different way. I think that in itself makes a school very approachable for a child who’s shy, because there’s someone holding your hand all the time.”
Added Joshi, “I just feel that they feel so loved. It’s very positive. That’s how a school should be.”
Fundraising for Playground Pals comes from the parent-teacher association, which provides a $1,500 yearly stipend toward supplies, although initially, Smyrl and some of the parent volunteers contributed their own money toward the program, said Joshi.
“When you see kids happy at recess–and recess can be a really hard time for kids–just to know that they get excited about it and they look forward to it, that is so worth it all,” said Smyrl.
Little Addison shared Smyrl’s enthusiasm.
“I think more schools should do it,” she said.
