At one school in Alameda, tag is banned. So is walking up the slides or stopping while going down. There’s no crouching under the play structure, no swinging jackets around one’s head, no playing with sticks and no hiding behind trees.

There are a lot of recess rules at Bay Farm Elementary.

On the opposite side of the island city, kids stuff themselves into car tires and squeal as they fly across the blacktop on the wheels of an old office chair. They can play tag, run up the slide, hide behind trees and crouch pretty much anywhere they want, including within wobbly forts and under the play structure.

There aren’t a lot of recess rules at William G. Paden Elementary.

The two schools and their divergent paths are no accident, and they may be familiar to many parents. They illustrate a modern anxiety over how children should play that is touching school blacktops across the state and country — and in this case, the same city.

The schools exemplify a renewed focus on the meaning and mechanics of recess, which was often neglected as schools increasingly focused on high-stakes standardized testing.

Research resoundingly supports the idea that kids learn best if they have a chance to let loose. But there are few official standards guiding recess in public schools, and that free time can look starkly different, depending on the decisions of administrators, who have a legal and professional obligation to keep kids safe.

Not everyone agrees on the definition of safe, though, and recess can become a hot topic among parents, whose mix of fears and fond memories of their own childhoods stirs complex emotions.

It’s a balancing act, experts say, one that should weigh independence and fun as well as safety and responsibility.

At Bay Farm, safety is a central element of play.

Last week, on one of the year’s first sunny days, kindergartners and first graders sat on the blacktop in lines after eating lunch, the play structure enticingly empty behind two playground monitors wearing orange vests and holding whistles.

One by one, each line was given the go-ahead to play and the students jumped up, their eyes wild for recess. Some even ran.

“No running!” one monitor said to a group of students who took off. “Hey buddy, let’s walk.”

Some students headed for the slide, while others hung upside down from monkey bars. Several grabbed chalk to draw on the asphalt. A few groups played with balls, others jumped rope.

Back to Gallery How should our kids play at recess? Alameda schools offer... 6 1 of 6 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 2 of 6 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 3 of 6 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 4 of 6 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 5 of 6 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 6 of 6 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle











“Girls, girls,” one of the monitors said to students pausing atop the play structure, “if you’re going to slide, slide down.”

Bay Farm has perhaps a more traditional approach to recess, said Principal Babs Freitas.

“I wouldn’t say (students) are restricted here,” she said. “I’m trying to send them home in the shape we got them in.”

The general rule for recess is based on three simple questions, Freitas said: “Is it safe? Is it kind? Is it responsible?”

So, for example, climbing up the slide means other students can’t go down. Or it can mean muddy, wet footprints that end up on someone’s bottom. In other words, arguably not kind or responsible.

“Slides are made to go down,” Freitas.

On the school’s third-grade playground, Brody Esquer wandered on the grass with a couple of friends.

He gets in trouble a lot at recess, he said, acquiring “uh-oh slips” for infractions like jumping off the slide. Three “uh-ohs” lead to an “oh no” and usually a trip to the principal’s office.

“I climbed up the slide once,” Brody said. “I got really busted.”

He wishes there were fewer rules. So does his mom.

“If you’re a 9-year-old boy, recess is almost uniformly what you say is your favorite thing about school,” said Lynn Christiansen Esquer, but that’s not the case with Brody. Recess, he said, is boring.

At one point last month, his mom said, there were only two balls for 75 students — and one was stuck on the roof.

The kids want to run on wet grass, chase each other, play make-believe games, Esquer said. Brody and a group of friends, bored on the blacktop, created a ouija board-type game one afternoon, pretending to conjure spirits. They were told to stop.

“As parents we are risk-averse, but we can take it too far,” she said. “We can’t bubble wrap our kids to this extent.”

Decades ago, there was no bubble wrap. Kids played dodgeball, Red Rover, Kill the Carrier and Crack the Whip, arguably unsafe games leading to shoulder dislocations, concussions and blows to the solar plexus.

Those kinds of games are now mostly relegated to wistful memories, as is cops and robbers given bans on guns in schools, even those made with a finger.

Growing societal worries about safety led to many risky games being banned, while playground equipment shifted from metal to plastic, the asphalt under the structures replaced by recycled rubber. In addition, school districts grew more wary of being held liable for injuries on the playground or athletic fields.

Under the No Child Left Behind test-score mandates, many schools started cutting minutes off recess — or skipping it altogether in favor of academics.

But in recent years, researchers have pushed for play and recess to make a comeback, with wide agreement that free time is not just about fun but critical to a child’s development.

“It affords a time to rest, play, imagine, think, move, and socialize,” the American Association of Pediatrics wrote in 2013, in a first-of-its-kind policy statement titled “The Crucial Role of Recess in School.” “Optimal cognitive processing in a child necessitates a period of interruption after a period of concentrated instruction.”

In other words, you need to play in order to learn. But just opening the doors and letting kids loose isn’t optimal either. Most experts suggest setting aside areas for specific activities, providing a range of equipment, teaching game rules and modeling conflict resolution.

Playworks, a national nonprofit promoting play in 1,000 schools nationwide, has brought back tag and dodgeball to school playgrounds, teaching the rules, using softer balls and showing kids how to tag with “butterfly fingers” to the shoulders and back.

“The kids want to play so much that they will take in the expectations of how to play safe and kind,” said Elizabeth Cushing, president of the Oakland organization. “They are intrinsically good humans.”

According to federal figures, about 4 million children are injured at school each year, although the vast majority suffer minor cuts and bruises.

Across Alameda at Paden, play has evolved over the last few years, from an environment focused on safety rules to one embracing imagination and experimentation.

Three sheds sit on the blacktop filled with pool noodles, car tires, fuzzy fabric, old keyboards, lawn chairs, industrial cardboard tubes, fake grass, boxes, plastic boards and an array of cushions, among other eclectic items.

The base of an old mobile office chair is particularly popular. On a recent afternoon it served as a race car pushed across the playground with a wide-eyed passenger hanging onto the sides.

“We looked at our school and our beliefs in our kids and this is what we came up with,” said Principal Katherine Barr. “I think I’m the only school on the island that allows tag.”

During a morning recess — which was extended last year to 30 minutes — most students sprinted to grab the stuff from the shed, though several headed for a game of soccer or the play structure, or to an organized Star Wars game with the physical education teacher.

Barr’s rules are the same as Freitas’: “Be safe. Be kind. Be responsible.”

She believes children can be all those things while also going up the slide — if they’re mindful of others. But she also bans playing with sticks.

Barr noted that when there were more restrictions, three kids broke their arms, so there are no guarantees.

She hasn’t seen more injuries under the new environment. In fact, she said, fewer kids take time to get a Band-Aid for minor scrapes because they want to keep playing. While not all parents are totally comfortable with the philosophy, the school community worked together to come up with this model, Barr said.

“It takes me back to my childhood days,” said Erin Head, the school’s librarian, who helped create the play sheds with a grant from Lowe’s and donations from a tire store and other local businesses.

On the day she spoke, a four-footed walking cane was a microphone for two girls, while an old suitcase remained an old suitcase, albeit with a child tucked inside. One boy put tires together and crawled inside.

Inside a parachute-covered fort with a plastic grass floor and lawn-chair cushions to sit on, Hayden Gong, 8, offered up her definition of recess.

“Recess is for playing, creating new things and making friends,” she said.

“To create your own masterpiece and be, like, free,” said her friend Miguel Alvarez, also 8. “To scream, ‘We’re free! Free!’”

Jill Tucker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jtucker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jilltucker

Playground safety by the numbers

4 million

Children injured at school per year.

200,000

Playground (home and school) injuries treated in emergency rooms per year.

6

Percent of emergency medical dispatches that go to schools for school-age children.

1:400

Ratio of children’s fatalities that occur at school.

80

Percent of elementary school children who visit the school nurse per year.

10 to 25

Percent of injuries to children and adolescents that occur at school.

147

Children 14 and younger who died from playground injuries between 1990 and 2000.

70

Percent of those playground deaths that occurred on home playgrounds.