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The Safe Play Game Plan

April 21, 2015

On Feb. 10, bills were introduced into both the United States Senate and United States House of Representatives, together called the “Safe Play Act,” which addresses three of the four health and safety “H’s” described in my last posting: Heat, Hearts and Heads.

For each of these topics, the federal legislation would mandate that the director of the Centers for Disease Control develop educational material and that each state disseminate that material.

For the heat and humidity management topic, the legislation states that schools will be required to adopt policies very much like the “MHSAA Model Policy to Manage Heat and Humidity” which the MHSAA adopted in March of 2013.

For both the heart and heat topics, schools will be required to have and to practice emergency action plans like we have been promoting in the past and will be distributing to schools this summer.

For the head section, the legislation would amend Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments and would eliminate federal funding to states and to schools which fail to educate their constituents or fail to support students who are recovering from concussions. This support would require multi-disciplinary concussion management teams that would include medical personnel, parents and others to provide academic accommodations for students recovering from concussions that are similar to the accommodations that are already required of schools for students with disabilities or handicaps.

This legislation would require return-to-play protocols similar to what we have in Michigan, and the legislation would also require reporting and record-keeping that is beyond what occurs in most places.

This proposed federal legislation demonstrates two things. First, that we have been on target in Michigan with our four Hs – it’s like they read our playbook of priorities before drafting this federal legislation.

This proposed federal legislation also demonstrates that we still have some work to do.

Early Learners

January 26, 2016

The good news is that the minimum number of pupil instruction days required for public school students in Michigan increases from 175 to 180 for 2016-17. The bad news is, Michigan public school students are still sitting in the back of the school bus.

The U.S. is in the lower half of the world’s nations in the length of school year for secondary school students, and Michigan is in the lower half of U.S. states in the length of school year. So just about anything the Michigan Legislature would consider to facilitate earlier starts to the school year as well as longer school days and weeks of instruction would be good for today’s students and our state’s future.

Among bills now pending in the Michigan Legislature is Senate Bill 567 that would remove the prohibition on public schools from beginning instructional days before Labor Day, except that classes could not be held on the Friday before Labor Day.

Some will be critical because this could put classes in conflict with double session sports practice days and large, all-day cross country, golf, soccer and tennis tournaments that are now common in Michigan school sports in late August; but these so-called conflicts would have positive effects:

These “conflicts” would tend to reduce the number of days of two-a-day practices that are much less in favor today with increasing attention to the health and safety of student-athletes.

These “conflicts” would tend to reduce the frequency of students playing in contests before they have attended any classes, which is far from ideal philosophically and a frequent cause of practical problems – including participation by ineligible students and resulting forfeits.

Students are engaged in school sports, marching band, cheerleading and other school-related activities throughout most of August, and they are much more eager learners then than later in the school year. Schools should be allowed to let them learn in the classroom then, not just in extracurricular activities.