Playground makeover
Volunteers from Blue Cross & Blue Shield help spruce up Globe Park playground
Blue Cross & Blue Shield volunteers help spruce up the playground at Globe Park.
WOONSOCKET — A group of adults in blue and white t-shirts showed up at the Globe Park Elementary School playground on Friday morning, but it wasn’t for a class reunion of former students.
The group of 50 volunteers had actually stopped in at the school Friday to paint a new activity layout on the playground asphalt as part of the healthcare insurance company’s sixth annual “Blue across Rhode Island” community service day projects.
The event capped a Blue Cross & Blue Shield partnership with Globe Park to improve recess time for the school’s 528 students, and even drew Blue Cross President and CEO Kim Keck to see what the company’s employees were accomplishing at the site one of 13 Blue across Rhode Island projects conducted around the state Friday.
The company volunteers statewide would be putting in almost 4,000 hours of their time to help local communities like Woonsocket with special projects, according to Keck, a former resident of Cumberland.
“It’s phenomenally effective and I’m proud to be a part of a company that gives back so much to the community,” Keck said of the Blue across Rhode Island contributions.
The company also awards financial grants as part of the program, and provided $5,000 to assist with the Globe Park playground initiative, she noted.
The grant went to the partnership Globe has with Playworks, a non-profit group promoting innovative ways to incorporate social and emotional learning and just plain fun in a student’s recess time, and provided both project supplies and training for Globe staff.
“Playworks’ impact on a school is incredible,” Keck said while pointing to the program’s success in helping students to have a better focus on their schoolwork when back in class and also learning how to solve problems with other students in a more positive way.
Playworks Executive Director Jon Gay, running the program on Globe’s playground, said the organization has been working with Globe on improving recess time for the past two years with Blue Cross & Blue Shield’s help, and there has already been an improvement in how children play at the school.
“We start with recess and try to make recess an opportunity to development some important skills, but recess should also be fun,” Gay said while talking with the group about Friday’s work project.
The Department of Education has mandated that Rhode Island students have at least 20 minutes of recess a day and for many children, that is the only physical activity time they will have during the course of a day, he noted.
But just getting out on the playground is not enough; according to Gay, students should also be able to learn something during that time through the way they play games and also resolve disputes that might result.
As one example, he showed the Blue across Rhode Island volunteers how a simple game like ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’ could be used in conflict resolution when a game score or outcome was in question. The adults even got to break up into groups and try it out themselves with a mock ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’ championship.
“If a student has a great recess, it is going to fundamentally change their perspective going back to class,” he said. “Discipline referrals and incidents of bullying will all go down,” he said while explaining that will in turn improve learning in the school.
The changes aimed at helping students run a better recess period for themselves also teach them how to resolve conflicts so they don’t need an adult to do that for them, according to Gay.
Pam Johnston, who works with Brad Walling as Globe’s health and physical education teachers, said the Playworks program trained Globe’s staff to provide more activities during recess that, in turn, help students get the most of time they have outside their classroom.
The blacktop play area is now a “sports court,” with different areas created through paint marking for games such as four square, kickball, and even a yak track, where the children can walk a circular lane around the playground and just talk to each other.
“They are out here everyday to play, and so now they are going to have more options and it will be great for them,” Johnston said.
Katherine Dallow, a Blue Cross & Blue Shield medical director found in a group putting down painting tape to create the new playground zones, said she was impressed by planning that went into the new design.
“I was very excited to participate in this project and with two elementary age chil- dren myself, I plan to use some of these ideas in my own household,” she said.
Globe Principal Tina Silva said she found it to be amazing that a large company like Blue Cross would put so much effort into a project benefitting a neighborhood school like hers.
“They send their employees here to fix your playground and you also get a partnership with Playworks to help change how the children play here, and make it much more organized,” she said. Silva credited the changes with helping to reduce the number playground incidents and behavior problems at school.
“My teachers have been trained in the program and kids have been trained and they come back to class ready to learn,” she said.