A Complex Problem in Division

A year ago, recesses at Woodlawn Avenue Elementary School became wildly free-form, a throwback to the past. Students could run around anywhere on the playground, play just about anything they wished.

“It got out of control,” fifth-grader Rolando Luma said.

Which is why order has been restored to the small slab of asphalt that serves as the only playground at one of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s most intensely crowded schools. The tiny campus in Bell accommodates almost 900 students on any given day. The playground is only 75 yards square, far short of the school district goal of providing eight square yards of schoolyard space for each student.

On Woodlawn’s playground, kickball players are allowed to dominate one end, basketball players another. Children line up on benches to await turns at tetherball and handball. There are monkey bars near the fence at Wilcox Avenue, but for safety reasons, they are forbidden territory.

Teachers and parent volunteers patrol the grounds, some under the shade of umbrellas, making sure students stay in their designated areas, trying to see that no one gets hurt. Every so often, a skinned knee or banged-up elbow requires a trip to the nurse’s office. There is not a blade of grass to be found.

“This is a massive effort here, with such a small space,” said Assistant Principal Cynthia Williams.

At a time when schools are facing difficult trade-offs between class size and recreational space, Woodlawn is one of the worst off. It is an old school--its 70th anniversary party is scheduled soon--in an area where student populations have exploded. A new state funding plan offers substantial additional money for schools that reduce class sizes in primary grades, but Woodlawn will be hard-pressed to qualify.

New portable classrooms would be needed to house the extra classes a reduction would create. Two “temporary” portables were added 30 years ago and they are still here, filled every day. To add more would be just about impossible without slicing the playground even smaller.

An ad hoc committee is being formed this week, and teachers are expected to have a daylong brainstorming session soon to “hash out every possible option,” Williams said.

“It’s frustrating,” she said. “We’d love to have a bigger yard, but what can we do?” Maybe nothing. A whole slew of adjustments have already been made. Like hundreds of other Los Angeles Unified schools, Woodlawn is on a year-round schedule. At the moment, 450 students are on vacation. Still, playground time must be staggered, parceled out during three morning recesses and four lunch hours.

By the time one grade level spends 20 minutes playing, it is time to return to class and the next group to go out. They come and go in throngs, 250 per shift. And every afternoon, someone’s P.E. class meets on the playground, squeezing more use out of the school’s tired equipment.

Students offer mixed reviews of the arrangement. Some say it is “fine,” “cool,” even “perfect.”

It is all they have ever known.

Others peer across the hot asphalt, see the two basketball courts, two volleyball nets, two kickball diamonds and the encircling chain-link fence, and wonder why there isn’t more. Off to the side, near the cafeteria and the tiny faculty parking lot (19 spaces), there are four walls for handball and five tetherball poles (four with balls), but that’s it, really.

“I think they should put in more stuff--slides, swings, a swimming pool,” said fourth-grader Andrea Michel, 8, who admits that sometimes she doesn’t play at all, just sits on the benches under the shade of an awning and talks to her friends.

Marisol Medina, 8, also yearns for a pool. In the summer it gets very hot on the asphalt. “Sometimes my head hurts because it’s so hot,” she said.

The asphalt is hard, too. Third-grader Carlos Ernesto Hernandez Jr. said that is his biggest complaint. “We just wish the ground was like the monkey-bars ground,” he said, alluding to a rubberized safety mat. “The real cement is too hard and sharpy, and if you fall you can bleed.”

That has happened to him three times this year, Hernandez said. Once, he cut his elbow, once his knuckle. The last time, playing kickball, he scraped his knee.

“I had to run the bases, and a boy named Roberto pushed me, because he wanted to get me out, and I fell,” he said. “The blood was coming out for a long time . . . for like five minutes.” He was safe, though, because “I had my foot on the base.”

Children play hard and fast when they know they have only 20 minutes before the next shift takes their place on the busy schoolyard.

Third-grader Jesse Morales, 7, who wore a spot of mustard on his chin from a lunch-hour hot dog, also remembered a nasty fall, while chasing down a stray basketball. He cried “a little bit,” had to go see the nurse. She dabbed off the blood with a sponge.

“It was cold,” he remembered.

Sometimes the games overlap--one kickball game clashing against another, just 40 yards away. Six or seven students line up, waiting 10 or more, to get into a handball game. The first to 10 points gets to keep playing; the loser gets back in line, or goes elsewhere.

The recesses seem to fly by.

“They’re too short--20 minutes, that’s all,” said fourth-grader Shabbir Rizvi, 9, who plays dodgeball, handball, kickball and netball, a schoolyard variation of volleyball. During a netball game Thursday on the crowded playground, he crashed into a classmate, both going for the same ball. They fell and got up and went on.

That is pretty much the ethic on the tiny playground--you get up, go on, no whining over recess. It’s recess, after all.

So second-grade kickball player Jeffrey Galdamez, 7, rounded third base and streaked for the yellow-painted home plate. The inflatable ball came in from left field. A fielder lunged for him, letting the ball slip out of his hands. Galdamez tumbled forward and rolled across the plate, safe, rising in triumph.

“They didn’t get me out,” he said, eyes wide. “He throwed the ball.”