The School Board's Role in Preventing Concussions and Head Injuries
On April 23, 2012, Mike Patterson joined nationally renowned concussion expert Dr. Robert Cantu of the Boston University School of Medicine to present a special session on "School Boards and the Prevention of Concussions and Other Head Injuries" at the 2012 National School Boards Association (NSBA) Annual Conference in Boston. Dr. Cantu is Co-Director of BU's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy; Chief of Neurosurgery Service, Chairman of the Department of Surgery, and Director of Sports Medicine at Emerson Hospital in Concord, Massachusetts; Co-Director of the Neurologic Sports Injury Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston; and founder of the Sports Legacy Institute. The session informed school board members and superintendents about the prevalence and costs of catastrophic injuries in school athletics, the science of head injuries and head injury prevention, the school boards' collective role in local and state best practices for prevention, and a big trap for unwary school districts to avoid.
Mr. Patterson represented the Washington school district in litigation that arose from the Zack Lystedt case, in which a high school football player returned to the game after having suffered a concussion and was re-injured, suffering permanent brain damage. That incident gave rise to Washington's "Zack Lystedt Law," which establishes guidelines for when a student athlete suspected of having sustained a head injury can be allowed to return to play. The statute has been emulated in many other states. Mr. Patterson and Don Austin have spoken nationally on preventing and managing catastrophic injuries in school sports, including most recently to the Education Law Association and in a public radio interview about a California case.
NSBA is a federation of state school boards associations that serve some 98,000 school board members who govern the nation's over 14,000 school districts.