This year, like last, about 200,000 Chicago public elementary school students spent recess indoors during the first week of the school year, when the heat index reached 114 degrees Fahrenheit. In recent weeks, schools have also canceled outdoor activities in and around Washington, D.C., where temperatures topped 100 degrees last month, and in Southern California. Those schools have good reason to be cautious: Kids are Particularly vulnerable In a tragic incident last year, due to the extreme heat, 12 year old from California He collapsed during a gym class and died on the second day of a heat wave warning.The Law of Yahshua—A bill currently on the governor’s desk would require the state to set temperature standards for outdoor school activities, including recess.
During the first and last week of school, as temperatures continue to rise in some places, recess may move indoors every day. But kids also need to be outdoors. Recess improves grades and is where kids learn how to problem-solve and collaborate. The quickest way to keep playgrounds open during a heatwave is to keep them out of the sun. Shade can make people feel as much as 72 degrees cooler, UCLA researchers found. In the coming years, schools’ ability to install artificial shade structures may be key to surviving June, August and September recess.
When researchers measured the shade on schoolyards, they found that most schoolyards had very little shade. In St. Louis, for example, they found that the city’s elementary school yards, on average, were almost completely exposed to direct sunlight. Some schools had no shade at all. In California, 91 percent of the average schoolyard had no trees at all.
It’s no coincidence that playgrounds lack shade: Many public playgrounds were designed without trees, and in the 1980s there were lawsuits over playground injuries. Urban Planner Trees came to be seen not as shade providers but as an invitation to climbers who could break their arms. Encouragement was given to cutting down trees on playgrounds, as well as replacing concrete and grass with resilient, less prone to falls surfaces such as rubber mulch and artificial turf, which trap heat. In many places, metal and plastic play equipment has replaced wooden equipment. SaferThe bigger problem is that it gets too hot Causes severe burns.
Planting trees can help with heat stress, but by the time the trees planted today have grown to be effective, generations of children will have graduated from elementary school. Shade structures, such as UV-resistant tarpaulin canopies, can be erected in just a few days. But installing a shade system can cost thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars. The PTA of one Florida school raised money to install a shade system. $17,000 For example, in Prosper, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, students stay indoors when the perceived temperature exceeds 100 degrees, but simply installing a single UV-resistant tarp on an elementary school playground can help. $95,000.
Public schools and nonprofits can apply for up to $8,000 in shade-building funding from the American Academy of Dermatology. The organization acknowledges that it won’t cover the full cost of many projects. Still, the grants are one of the few outside sources of funding for such projects. Dermatologists are focused on limiting lifelong sun exposure, much of which occurs in childhood, but the organization was able to fund just four schools in 2024.
When Susan Godfrey was a teacher in Robinson, Texas, she applied for AAD grants three years in a row. She says her principal told her the school didn’t have the funds to build shade on the schoolyard. The kids in her class “wanted to go outside,” she told me. But “after five minutes, their little faces were red” and they huddled listlessly under a single tree at the edge of the schoolyard. Winning a grant ultimately requires community involvement, in this case distributing small bottles of sunscreen donated by a local dermatologist at the town’s fall festival to raise awareness about sun exposure, but she needed funding from the school district to purchase the shade structures. Godfrey initially hoped the grant would provide shade for the entire schoolyard, but in the end, the school had enough funds to cover the slide.
Some schoolyards are more severely lacking in shade than others. Jolie Potts, the dermatologist who led the St. Louis study, noticed the shade slowly disappearing from schoolyards as she drove from the suburbs to her hospital in downtown St. Louis. In the study, she and her colleagues also found that as the percentage of a school’s students receiving subsidized lunches (a common indicator of child poverty) increased, the amount of shade in schoolyards decreased, on average. A similar 2024 study looked more generally at shade in Austin elementary, middle, and high school yards and found that for every 10% increase in school lunch program enrollment, the school lost about the size of two basketball courts’ worth of shade. When schools try to make improvements, it’s often “very hard to cover heat-related issues” by raising funds through bonds, but “it’s easier in wealthier districts,” Paul Czynowski, director of the environmental design program at the University of Colorado Boulder, told me.
Federal programs to help schools adapt to climate change currently focus on covering the planning costs of energy efficiency, or building renovations, but not implementation costs. Unless there is more funding for shade, especially funding that doesn’t require winning a contest, “you’re going to see school districts in many parts of the country recessing indoors for the first two weeks, even a month. I don’t think that day is that far away,” Cinowski said. The heatwaves will continue through the school year. Phoenix recorded its 100th consecutive day of 100-degree heat this month. The city started thinking about shade more than a decade ago. It’s behind on its goal of shading 25% of the city by 2030, but just having a plan puts it ahead of many cities with similar heat.
Even if kids spend their August and September recess indoors, they’ll probably stay in the classroom. In warmer climates, where outdoor play is the norm, many elementary schools haven’t invested in gyms. “You’re going to see more kids spending recess indoors in places that aren’t conducive to physical activity,” Kelly Turner, a heat researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, told me. “Kids are watching movies during recess indoors at my daughter’s school.” Some teachers are using the free time between classes to cram in more instruction. Others are saying, “We’re going to see more kids spend recess indoors in places that aren’t conducive to physical activity.”Unleash the tremors” But it can’t recreate the unstructured play that kids need as they get older. I remember the first time I felt like I had a friend in second grade. We were playing tag, and my friend was really chasing me. I’m sure there were a few days that year when I spent recess inside, but I don’t remember them.
