School district bans games of tag to protect children’s ’emotional safety’

It must hurt to be “it.”

At least that’s what the kids of Washington State’s Mercer Island School District must be left to assume, after administrators there banned the playground game of tag in order to protect, in their own words, the kids’ “physical and emotional safety.”

The Seattle-area school system outlawed playground tag without any evident provocation — no freakish traumatic incident, no injury, no reported complaint. According to KCPQ News, parents didn’t know about the ban until, one day, their kids came home and starting talking.

“Kids at the Mercer Island School District are now banned from playing the popular childhood game of tag on the playground,” KCPQ reported.

“Parents told Q13 Fox News they had no idea about the ban until their kids told them. Now, moms and dads are asking why they weren’t part of the decision-making process.”

But once they found out, parents got together and created a closed Facebook group to communicate a strategy for convincing the school district to overturn the ban. It currently has more than 400 members.

“STAR MI (Support ‘Tag’ At Recess in MI) is a group for Mercer Islanders who value physical activity at recess,” the Facebook page explains. “The game ‘tag’ was recently prohibited by Mercer Island Schools. Our group believes ‘tag’ and other child led games encourage independence and much needed activity. Our group wants to bring back ‘tag’ to Mercer Island schools.”

Simple enough, right?

As of Friday, no one within the school district showed any sign of reconsidering. Mercer Island School District communications director Mary Grady offered this rationale in an email to KCPQ:

The Mercer Island School District and school teams have recently revisited expectations for student behavior to address student safety. This means while at play, especially during recess and unstructured time, students are expected to keep their hands to themselves. The rationale behind this is to ensure the physical and emotional safety of all students.

School staffs are working with students in the classroom to ensure that there are many alternative games available at recess and during unsupervised play, so that our kids can still have fun, be with their friends, move their bodies and give their brains a break.

It’s not explained how banning tag helps guarantee that much-cherished safety.

“Once again we have an age-old childhood tradition that is suddenly too dangerous for this generation of kids,” Reason’s Lenore Skenazy remarked in a Friday column. “How can it be that for 450+ years (and possibly since the beginning of time), kids played this very same game, but today’s youngsters are just too fragile to handle it?”

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