by wkfung108 on Fri Jul 21, 2017 8:57 am
Rules, regulations, and laws governing whether you are allowed to teach in a public park are largely going to be local -- it depends on the town or city where you'll be teaching. I suspect often it's a bit of a gray area. Every town is going to have SOME sort of vaguely worded rules or laws that regulate or somewhat prohibit commercial and group activities in public parks, more or less.
From a practical standpoint, whether you can GET AWAY with teaching in a public park depends on any number of things. For example:
How much of the park are you going to be using? If you pick a relatively small park, and you're teaching a reasonably large group of students (so, 20 or more), that's more likely to get noticed, both by jerks who enjoy filing complaints (some people don't have much of a life), and by police officers passing by on patrol. Conversely, if you're giving private, semi-private, or small-group lessons (say, 10 or fewer students at a time), and especially if you're giving them in a very large park, you might not get noticed or hassled at all.
Are you teaching in a large city or a small town? Small-town cops are BORED. Really, really bored. If you're violating some obscure ordinance, they don't care any more than a big-city cop, but writing you up can break up the monotony of their day, and they tend to be desperate for anything that can do that. An officer New York or Chicago frankly doesn't give a shit because he has bigger and better (or worse, depending on your perspective) things to worry about.
Personally, I have both taught (wing chun) and taken (baguazhang) lessons in various NYC public parks for quite a few years now (not consistently) and it's never been a problem. I've had a few friendly passersby asking "What is it that you're doing?" and once I had an old Chinese dude who had been training nearby (this was in Chinatown) interrupt to tell me he saw my teacher training in the park all the time and that I was lucky to be learning under him. Everyone else has largely left us alone.
Your intention to include sparring might present a little bit of a problem. Officials are going to worry about liability issues if you do anything that looks to them to resemble a kickboxing, wrestling, or MMA match. (You could probably get away with some types of push hands, though.)
If your local park requires a permit that's free or fairly inexpensive to obtain, I'd recommend getting one. I'd further recommend that rather than say you're teaching "martial arts," tell the clerk you'll be teaching "Tai Chi." Because your average American bureaucrat will hear that and picture you teaching little old ladies how to move in slow motion, and nothing could possibly go wrong with granting your application for something like that, right?
Good luck!
Last edited by
wkfung108 on Fri Jul 21, 2017 8:58 am, edited 1 time in total.