Playworks offers a variety of service options to best meet the needs of our partner schools and youth serving organizations. TeamUp provides a Playworks Site Coordinator to up to four partner schools for the full school year. The Site Coordinator serves in a consultant role for their schools throughout the year, utilizing the “I do, We do, You do” teaching method. They spend one week of every month at each of their schools leading, supporting, and empowering the recess team to create a safe, healthy, and inclusive playground for all students.
Playworks Indiana has 10 TeamUp partners this school year, split between our three Site Coordinators: Jamequa Harris, Karlencia Johnson, and Anna Savery. These Site Coordinators are challenged with juggling multiple schools and rotating between them every week. They are providing tailored experiences that fit each school’s respective needs and it can be complicated.
“Juggling four schools is a hard but fun experience. It’s hard to build the rapport that I would like at each school in such a small amount of time a week but it’s so fun playing with all of the students and watching their faces get excited when you come back after a month. I enjoy getting to know everyone from the teachers to the students, I just wish there was more time! We all love playing together and the competitive spirit there is very fun and serious with the older kids. They let a coach know they are not going to go easy on her. It’s so fun.” -Jamequa Harris
TeamUp is our capacity building direct service, bringing together elements of both Coach and our Pro services to create systems level change for schools and establish a high-functioning, healthy recess that leads to positive student and school outcomes. Schools with TeamUp follow a lot of the same structure as our Coach schools do; a Playworks recess, class game time, and the Junior Coach leadership program. So what happens when the Site Coordinators aren’t there to facilitate games and run the Junior Coach program? School staff and teachers take on that responsibility as the “Recess Team” and put their Playworks training to work for the weeks that Site Coordinators are offsite.
“Kids need to be able to play at recess so they can get the most out of class time. Playworks helps break down barriers to play, which allows kids to be kids.” -Anna Savery, Site Coordinator
TeamUp has been around in Indiana for a while and we are so proud of the joint impact we have been able to achieve with our partners over the years. There are also plenty of exciting changes and developments to TeamUp this school year, like the addition of our All IN Sports Leagues program. Thanks to our partnership with Indiana Sports Corp, we are ramping up our non-competitive developmental sports leagues to give more students the opportunity to participate in high quality after school programming..
If you’re interested in learning more about TeamUp and getting Playworks TeamUp at your school, contact our Regional Partnership Manager Audrey Hallmann at audrey.hallmann@playworks.org.
Special shoutout to all our 2022-2023 TeamUp partner schools: Clinton Young, James Russel Lowell 51, Francis Parker 56, George W Julian 57, Lakeside, Rousseau McClellan 91, GWC 86, Butler Lab 55, Abraham Lincoln Elementary, Brookview. You are all recess rockstars!
