I recall clearly that the very young 1st and 2nd grade kids were in an entirely different wing at my elementary school. They had a separate play ground area during recess. IIRC they got out of school a hour or two earlier too. probably 2pm but I’m not sure.
I know the school claims they were short staffed and mixed the kids. But this would have never occurred at my old elementary school. We never even saw the younger kids.
My old school is still operating 40 plus years later. I drive by there anytime I’m in my old home town. Its on a major street that leads to my mom’s house. It still has the 1st, 2nd grade playground on one side of the building and the much bigger playground/ball field on the opposite side. I only attended sixth grade there because we had moved from another state.
Have things changed that much? Are 1st and 2nd grade kids just thrown together with older kids? Theres a lot of reasons to be concerned. Bullying, drug use etc. Thats why middle school kids are in a different location from elementary schools. Keeping older kids away from the much younger ones makes sense. imho
I was going by the dad’s comment that he picked up his son from school. But I see where the article seems to imply it was a daycare.
But the basic question about elementary schools is still the same. I’m not sure what they do now. Do 1st and 2nd graders still get released earlier? around 2pm? I always thought it was because their attention spans were shorter and they tired more easily. But that’s just my assumption. Releasing them earlier was common 40 years ago when I attended school.
Seems like they’d keep the very vulnerable 1st and 2nd graders separate from the older kids. But I don’t know if schools still do that today.
I generally wouldn’t get too excited about my kid coming home bruised. Our recess games got pretty rough at times. We played soccer during lunch recess. But this kid was only 5. Thats too young to be getting bullied and pushed around like that.
My daughter taught in a local elementary school. Each grade had its own block of classrooms, its own lunch time, and its own recess time. But they started and ended all together and rode the same buses. I don’t recall her ever talking about bigger kids bullying the little ones, and she’d taught both 2nd and 5th grade in her years there.
We all rode the same school bus too. Well, 3rd grades through 6th did. 3rd,4th,5th and 6th grade classerooms were along the same long hallway. Each grade spent the entire day in one of those rooms with a teacher. Recesses were mixed. It was only the 1st and 2nd grade they kept separate.
Sounds like your daughter’s school took separation even further then mine did. With separate lunch and recess for each grade.
I wouldn’t be surprised if 1st, 2nd graders attend a full day now. Theres more expected from kids these days. push, push, push with preschools and so on. Letting them leave at 2pm might be unthinkable today.
I was just thinking, I’ve had kids in various elementary schools for 25 years. The youngest is still elementary age. For all the schools, kindergarten is very separate from everyone else in the building, and then grades 1-3 are in their own little area. Grades 4-6 are at another end of the building. No real mixing in school. They all ride the same bus and have the same full day, though. I think the youngest are required to sit up front.
I attended full day 1st and 2nd grade over 20 years ago, so that’s not new, although of course it depends on the area. The kindergartners rode the bus home with the high schoolers (who started school an hour earlier and went home an hour earlier), which really wasn’t the best idea either. At five or six, I saw an incident on the bus between a teen and a little kid that I didn’t realize was wrong until it was several years too late to do anything about it.
Absolutely not the case at my kids’ school - in fact, the reverse. They have a very comprehensive buddy program, involving matching Grade 5s with the little prep kids (=“kindergarten”), the grade 1’s with the grade 4’s (not sure if they do that any more) and a rostered bunch of grade 6’s running “little kids game time” for whoever rocks up to the multi-purpose room once a week (and when I say ‘rostered’ I mean in the sense of my daughter and her friends were stampeding to be ON the roster as much as possible and play with the small cute kids - these were not draftees)
They do have a couple of small segregated play spaces in the grounds - the “big kids playground” and “little kids playground”, but mostly they just mix, and I must say I like that scheme much better than the one you’re describing. Doesn’t most bullying happen between kids in the same class, anyway?
60 years ago at my school, K-6 grades were all together in a building and all grades ran full day from 8:45-3:30 (2:30 on Fridays). We did have separate recess times (except in winters when grades 1-2, 3-4, 5-6 used the gym or pool together). Those who rode the bus, rode the bus together, but most of us walked or rode bikes.
First and second graders attended a full day when I started school in 1968- they got out around 2pm in my school , but so did everyone else,right up to 8th grade. Only kindergarten was half-day then (and there was no such thing as pre-k). Everyone had lunch at the same time, because we went home. Two or three grades had recess at the same time- but it was because the school yard was not big enough for the whole school to have recess at the same time, not to keep the seventh graders ( or even fourth graders) away from the first graders.
I wonder how much of the “separation” you remember was really due to other issues. When my kids were in preschool, the preschool class was on the third floor of the school, the only floor with no other classrooms. But it wasn’t to keep the the pre-K kids separate- it was because by law, they needed an exclusive restroom on the same floor as the classroom. A 2 pm dismissal really doesn’t seem that early- perhaps that was simply to cut down on the chaos of dismissing every class at the same time.
My school was K-12. Kindergarten had one recess area. 1-3 another, 4-5 another, and 6th another. All jr. high/highschool was together. As far I know, this was because we all had recess at the same time (possibly excepting Kindergarten). All used the same lunchroom, but lunchtime was staggered (we certainly wouldn’t all fit) with younger classes first until the 7-12th grades that came in different times during 5th period, but I don’t know if that was grade-based or not. There was a K-3 building, a 4-6 building (that had the lunchroom), and several 7-12 buildings. All students shared the same buses and schedule except elementary school got out 5 minutes earlier so they could get loaded onto the buses before the high school students overran the place.
It could have been other factors that I wasn’t aware of. For example, Playground equipment for very young kids is smaller scaled. That might be another explanation for the separate playgrounds during recess.
A lots changed since the 1970’s. I attended junior high. Now my old junior high is called a middle school. But at least its still in use.
Kindergarten is a full day here whether we like it or not, so I assume same with 1st and 2nd graders. I was that age in the early 80s, and while kindergarten was a half day (and optional, I believe), after that the kids all had the same length day per building. For instance, I think elementary school didn’t begin till almost 9 AM, but high school started around 7:45 AM. Something I always found odd, since little kids tend to get up at the crack of dawn…teenagers, not so much.
I do recall a little kid vs big kid playground in elementary school, and lunches were somewhat staggered.
I don’t think things have changed; I think your school was unusual. I was in first grade 32 years ago, and we had the same school day length as the older kids. I’ve only heard of kindergarteners getting out at a different time as older elementary students.
As for recess, we didn’t have a separate playground for little kids, but due to a small playground size recess was staggered so if you were in first grade, it was you and the second graders. And if you were in third grade, it was you and the fourth graders. Fifth graders had recess alone, but then they shipped the whole grade off to the middle school a couple of years later.
I went to a K-8 school, starting about 60 years ago. Recesses were staggered, and the one story building had kindergarten near the office and the three sections of every other grade arranged starting with first on one end going in order until we hit eighth at the other. Two grades had Mass on the same day once a week, and we had a whole school Mass on First Friday, and whole school Stations every Lenten Friday.
But we did not have staggered dismissal times. We started at 8:05 or something and released at 2:50, and all 1200 kids left at once.
I work at a school with preschool-8th. Preschool-k, 1-6, and 7-8 have separate recess. Before school all kids except the middle schoolers are out on the playground. I’m almost always out there with them, and it’s very rare for the older kids to pick on the younger ones.
Every school in every school district in every state is going to have its own setup, whatever works best for that community. There is no reason to think a school in Yourtown, IL should work the same way as one in Mytown, OH.
But regardless, the first sentence of this story is: “A Florida father was horrified when his 5-year-old son came home from daycare looking beaten up and bruised.”
I think it should be 100% the other way. Instead of separating them and making them into different worlds, put them together. Make the elder children mentor the younger ones (well, not all of them, but you know what I mean).
Cuz for every older child that beat me up, and there were only a small number, there were quite a few more who I aspired to be like or looked up to. It would have been nice to even spend half an hour every week or two weeks with an older child. I had no siblings, so that would have helped, too.
