When The Reaction is the Story

I heard a story on the radio this morning about an elementary school, south of Boston (Willet Elementary School in Attleboro to be exact), banning tag and other unsupervised chasing games during recess, fearing students would get hurt and parents would sue. The quote I want to remember, the one that made me shake my head in disbelief and wonder if I was listening to the "fake news" was, "Recess is a time when accidents can happen."

After a little digging online, I discovered the story was authentic. I found this article in The Sun Chronicle, a newspaper serving the greater Attleboro area in Massachusetts. It broke the news on Tuesday. From there, word spread across the country on the four winds of information (web, television, newspaper and radio).

By the way, the weakest of the winds is radio, especially morning drive radio, where 58 minutes of every hour are dedicated to banter, prank calls and a heavy rotation of Fergie and Nickelback songs. The remaining two minutes are for traffic updates twenty minutes too late and yesterday's news gleaned from the web. So, it was a minor miracle that I heard the story there first.

I also discovered the quote about recess wasn't made up, but was actually said by the school's principal, according to this Chicago Sun Times article.

While it would be easy to poke fun at the quote (which I believe the principal got straight out of Obviousness for Dummies) or the ban itself, that path already seems well-worn (and deeply rutted), as evidenced by this representative editorial in the Boston Herald and a small sampling of blogs. The opinions expressed are a three-part harmony of:

1. What will they ban next during recess? Movement?
2. This is why our kids are obese.
3. Schoolyard stories of yore; where kids got burns from metal slides, concussions from tetherballs to the head and splinters from tanbark and still grew up to be mostly normal adults.

I think the funniest aspect of the whole story is contained in the following paragraph from The Sun Chronicle article...

People from all over the country, including New York, Wisconsin and California, left comments on The Sun Chronicle's Web site - the story generated the heaviest response of any story ever posted on the site - and sent e-mails to reporters.

If you're the editor of the paper, you must be scratching your head and asking yourself, "Of all the stories we've ever printed, of all the news we've ever broken, this is the one that got people's attention? We write about health care and social security. Nothing. We write about privacy issues and habeas corpus. Still nothing. We write about war, torture, terrorism, natural disasters, politics, religion and more. Not a single peep. But we write a tiny story about a local school banning tag and everybody reacts. What gives?"