Heartfelt Efforts
May 15, 2015
- A written medical emergency response plan (ERP), reviewed at least annually with staff.
- A medical emergency response team (MERT) with current CPR/AED certification, sufficient to respond to an emergency during school hours AND during organized after-school activities and sports.
- At least 10% of staff, 50% of coaches and 50% of PE staff with current CPR/AED certification.
- The sufficient number of accessible, properly maintained and inspected AEDs, ready to use, with signs identifying AED locations. Sufficient number is estimated by time to scene, in place, and analyzing within a target goal of 3 minutes.
- The performance of at least one cardiac emergency response drill per year, including recognizing signs of sudden cardiac arrest and using the American Heart Association’s Chain of Survival: calling 9-1-1 and use of bystander CPR and AED until EMS arrive to provide advanced life support.
- All athletic preparticipation screening completed with the Michigan High School Athletic Association (MHSAA) form (updated in 2010).
MI HEARTSafe School designation is awarded for a period of three school years.
Transfers
January 10, 2017
When it comes to transfers, the staff of the Michigan High School Athletic Association gets lots of advice, but it comes from opposing directions.
One camp thinks MHSAA rules are inadequate. This group suggests that we expand the basic period of ineligibility from approximately 90 days to 180 days and/or it wants the MHSAA to eliminate most or all exceptions that allow for immediate eligibility of a transfer student.
This first camp is so frustrated with high-profile athletic-motivated or related transfers that they want to clamp down on all transfers.
The other camp thinks parents have the right and responsibility to send their children to any school they wish and have immediate access to the full benefits of that school’s curricular and extracurricular offerings.
This second camp is encouraged by the laws of Michigan which have gradually extended “schools of choice” as an option that all school districts may exercise. And this camp will be emboldened if the Secretary of Education under the new regime in Washington, D.C. is the long-time schools of choice advocate who has been nominated by the President-Elect for this position.
This second camp is on the right side of history, no matter how much I dislike it and no matter how convinced I am that the better way to have improved public education would have been to invest more in neighborhood schools. Improving them builds most communities. Ignoring them, as we have for 25 years, sends surrounding communities into downward spirals that worsen poverty and public health.
The ill-advised efforts to improve education by enticing students out of their neighborhoods to attend schools elsewhere has undermined “local ownership” in schools; and it has had the side effect of encouraging more transfers motivated by or related to athletics. Monitoring and managing such transfers is made more difficult by these educational reforms; but the new world will not tolerate transfer rules that are seen as too broad and contrary to what has become public policy, however poorly conceived and executed.
The fact is, the future of the transfer rule will be less about extending its reach and more about retaining its existence.