It does not matter if your sports team has a winning season. It does not matter if your marching band aces the competitions. You may think it does but you are wrong.
What matters is that you take care of the kids in your care and send them home each day: alive.
Franklin High School student dies after experiencing medical emergency, school says, Lilly Price, Glenn Graham, Madisson Weyrich, Baltimore Sun
The Baltimore Sun is careful to describe the student’s death as the result of a “medical emergency.” Autopsy results are pending.
But in a related article in the Capital Gazette by Lilly Price:
First responders with the Baltimore County Fire Department arrived at the football field Wednesday morning, responding to a call for an “unconscious subject” who “had a heatstroke.” There, Leslie Noble, a junior guard on the Reisterstown school’s varsity football team, was undergoing resuscitation efforts. He was transported in critical condition to a hospital, where he later died.
Climate change has brought extended periods of extreme heat. I don’t know how much the truth of that has transformed the time-worn traditions of back to school sports and band camps. I’m not saying that it hasn’t. Athletic and music staff very likely work extremely hard to balance each day’s goals with enough rest, hydration, and shade/cooling-off time.
But this is certainly not the first heat-related student death in Maryland in recent years.
In 2018, University of Maryland player Jordan McNair collapsed after a conditioning test from exertional heatstroke. The freshman and graduate of McDonogh School in Reisterstown died after a two-week hospitalization at Shock Trauma.
His death moved his family and Maryland legislators to pass the Jordan McNair Safe and Fair Play Act in 2021, requiring athletic departments to provide guidelines for preventing and treating brain injuries, heat-related illnesses and other conditions.
That same year, Elijah Gorham, a 17-year-old Baltimore City player, suffered a fatal traumatic brain injury while playing for Mergenthaler Vocational-Technical High School.
The Elijah Gorham Act became law in 2022, requiring all middle and high schools in Maryland to develop emergency action plans for all of their athletic venues, including for the use of defibrillators, which must be a "brief walk" from an athletic practice or event, and cooling equipment for heatstroke, which must be "readily available."
The law was passed a day after the city settled with Gorham's family. The lawsuit compels each city high school to hire an athletic trainer by the 2024-25 academic year.
This continuing pattern indicates to me that we haven’t yet taken the impact of climate change on these traditional student activities as seriously as we must. It looks as though we are trying to accommodate it as one might deal with a small inconvenience - - like an unexpected change in a daily schedule or a misplaced band instrument. But it’s far bigger than that.
2018, 2021, 2024.
If we are losing one student every three years that says to me that what we are doing is not working and that it is time to make profoundly transformative changes. That means asking some unthinkable questions.
- Is it necessary to hold these practices at one of the hottest times of the year?
- Do we consider the possibility that these events should be held inside in air-conditioned spaces?
- Have we invested in enough large indoor air conditioned spaces to accommodate that?
- Are we so wedded to these practices that we’d rather accept student deaths rather than let go of these traditions?
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