The Recess Regimen

Schools pay about $25,000 a year for Vialet's program; she raises the rest, about $45,000 per school, from private donors. For their money, schools get someone such as Riley, who walks students through the forgotten nuances of double Dutch and kickball. Teachers also receive training, so they can assist the site managers.

Riley, who runs both of the school's recess periods (the other is for first through fifth grades), leads snowball alley with a light but steady hand.

"Let me see everybody in rolling position," he says to a row of kids poised to roll their large rubber balls across the grass to another line of students. Those running between the lines have to maneuver around the balls.

Riley warns against throwing the balls, but one boy lofts his into the air, hitting a girl running the gantlet squarely, although not seriously, in the neck.

Riley quietly takes the snowball alley scofflaw aside. "You know you're not supposed to do that," he said, before letting him back into the game.

On the other side of the schoolyard, Vialet, visiting for the day, is observing three-on-three basketball. "Watch the hand checks!" she says.

At least half of the students at Brookland at Bunker Hill and the 13 other D.C. schools that have hired Sport4Kids are from low-income families. Vialet said that's where her donors are interested in spending money. Educators say that although Sports4Kids would work anywhere, kids from neighborhoods with a dearth of organized sports programs and crime that keeps many of them indoors face special deficits in learning how to play.

"A lot of our students don't have models for what meaningful play looks like," said Stephen Zrike Jr., principal of William Ohrenberger Elementary in the West Roxbury section of Boston, where a study by the Harvard Graduate School of Education reported a reduction in fights and disciplinary problems after the introduction of Sports4Kids.

What the kids themselves think is difficult to know for sure, because interviews for this report were conducted in the company of an assistant principal at Brookland at Bunker Hill. Fifth-grader Bryant Jones, 10, said that before Sports4Kids, recess was "a little boring," Jaden Wilson, also 10, said he liked the organization.

"I like the lines for the games," he said, "so that people don't say, 'Hey, you pushed me.' "

As for Wright, after Clark Elementary closed in June, he took Sports4Kids with him to his new assignment at Truesdell Educational Center, a school for grades pre-K through 8 in Petworth.

"Our school system has failed historically to teach our kids how to resolve conflicts," Wright said. "In the neighborhood, the one way to resolve conflict is to put your hands or a weapon on someone." Sports4Kids won't solve all of that, he said, but it's a start.

"So they can move beyond rock-paper-scissors."