Posted on 09/27/2008 3:37:36 PM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom
Teachers have sparked fury by banning pupils from playing in the playground before school - for health and safety reasons.
Children have been ordered not to play in the 15 minutes before lessons start - in case parents or their young children get injured at Ashburton Junior School in Croydon, south London.
Adam Bates, 31, whose 10-year-old son Shane had a tennis ball confiscated last week, said today: "It's ridiculous, the kids are deprived of valuable play time in the morning.
"Everyone's always going on about exercise but this school is clamping down on it.
"My kids really look forward to playing in the morning and this has really soured their mood.
"Shane is in his last year, but my five-year-old, Lucy, is going into her first and I don't want her to be educated in an environment like that.
But headteacher Lesley Lynam insisted pupils have plenty of playtime during the school day, and at after school clubs.
She added: "We have the no-play rule in place between 8.45am and 9am for health and safety reasons and everyone's protection.
"We simply can't have tennis balls flying around and kids knocking into parents and babies. People would get hurt otherwise."
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
...be sure to add merry-go-rounds, jungle gyms, teeter-totters and unfenced play yards. All sadly gone now.
And we played dodge ball and "bombardment", all kinds of kill-the-enemy games. :o)
Our team was named The Nasty Nauseating Nosepickers. The football coach doubling as our gym teacher got a real kick out of the names we chose for our teams in the kill-the-enemy ball games.
I only played football with kids my own age, but after 6th grade I was too small for football anyway.
Absolutely. And how did we ever survive without helmets?
Tennis balls are dangerous? Maybe from a rocket serve at Wimbledon, but come on! My elementary school days were the late 50’s and early 60’s and recess was a jungle gym, kickball, running, wrestling, etc. Nobody ever got hurt that I can remember - however, my brother and I used to have BB gun wars with scuba masks for protection, and around July 4th it was roman candle battles with garbage can lids for shields. We thought we were safety conscious until Mom found out and put the kibosh on that.
This is nothing to do with ‘socialism’ or ‘liberalism’ or any of that nonsense. It’s lawyers running riot taking on no-win-no fee cases and making pots of money from stupid cases, so people are scared witless of incurring any form of liability that could lead to them being financially ruined by litigation. It’s a disease of free-market economics if anything...
Well which party gets the majority of support from trial lawyers? Which side of the spectrum likes to micromanage people’s lives? Which party is concerned about everything health related, justified or not, and less so morally/fiscally responsible related?
LOL Good one
We also had a game called smear the qu*** where the object as to tackle the person holding on to the football. Yet somehow we all turned out just fine. I also remember chasing people around with switches. Hard to believe that in 10 short years things from my childhood are now considered dangerous.
My goodness. This teacher would break out in hives if she ever saw a good old American game of Buck-buck.
They didn’t have any of the don’t get hurt idiots when I went to school 60+ years ago, they wern’t born yet!
Well, all I know is that before ‘socialistic’ legal aid for personal injury claims was abolished in 1998, you either had to pony up your own money when you wanted to sue, or you had to justify yourself to the legal aid panel before they would provide funding for your case.
Now, because there’s so much money involved, thanks to the fact that no-win-no fee is now allowed were previously it was not due to gov’t regulations, many firms offer this were clients have nothing to lose from trying it on, and enough stupid cases are successful to make it worthwhile for ambulence-chasing lawfirms to have a go. Therefore, people have reasons to be scared of litigation for what may look on the face of it ridiculous reasons. But when you consider the consequences, many find it better to obey the petty regulations and cover their asses rather than have to pay huge litigation insurance premiums by not following elf’n safety regs.....
Well, if it saves one child from one injury even one time, it is well worth it!
Even better is the Fact that.. that is their name and abbreviation for their version of the NEA.
I know, it was pretty hard getting a smoke in before school unless we crossed the street first where they had no jurisdiction.
I wasn’t playing with them; I was in 6th grade, new to the school and a tiny kid. Pretty easy to knock into me and not lose much steam.
Then there were the times when over 250lbs would sit on me...
Yikes. Best to stay out of the way of the oncoming steamrollers.
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