Concussions have always been the undesirableside effects of high school contact sports. The District recently enacted a new policy to help prevent long-term brain damage caused by these injuries. After carefully analyzing data that has been collected on which sports are most concussion prone, the District has mandated that certain sports require ImPACT testing, while others don’t.

Not every sport is required to take an ImPACT test, which can give athletes in certain high concussion sports, like Volleyball, achance to play and get injured without baseline scores to judge that they are in fact ready to return. By not requiring all sports to take the ImPACT test, the District risks the chance of long term brain damage for a student if they have a concussion that goes unnoticed or untreated. The safety and well-being of every student needs to be the District’s top priority. Even if the District believes it should be too, they do not exercise such values in their new policy by requiring some teams to test and not others.

The other demographic of students who can not benefit from ImPACT testing are those athletes involved in non school sponsored sports, such as Hockey. Last year, the District severed ties with the Hockey program in an attempt to avoid legal backlash. At this point, it’s hard not to think this was a plan with long term implications in mind. Regardless of legal sponsorship, regardless of how hard the players work, regardless of how well the team plays, every athlete in this District is a student of this District, and the District has an obligation to protect each and every one of them.

While holding this obligation would be an expensive task for the District, it has committed itself to other costly programs aimed at student well-being in the past. This year, approximately 2,100 students will take the ImPACT test at an initial cost of roughly $5,000 to the District, plus any additional retesting. On the other hand, the District pays upwards of $22,000 on drug tests for the same number of students. It seems morally questionable that the District would neglect universally providing ImPACT testing, which potentially prevents severe brain injury, to every student while spending large sums of money to keep reprehensible drug users at bay.

Instead of keeping ImPACT testing exclusive to a sparse number of contact sports, the District has an obligation to open the program to any student who would like to take advantage of this beneficial program. Whether an athlete kills it on the gridiron or on the race track, each student should have access to and be required to take the ImPACT test. After all, school is a place for learning, and students cannot learn if they are suffering the effects of concussions. ImPACT could have such a great effect on the student body as a whole that it needs to be invested in. It needs to be utilized. It needs to be provided.

On behalf of the Editorial Staff