Letter to the Editor/Boston Globe - October 23, 2009

We appreciate Derrick Z. Jackson's calling attention to the fact that too often student athletes are sent back to the field when they are not fully healed from head trauma ("It's time to sideline players with head injuries'', Op-ed, Oct. 13). According to Jackson, brain injury researchers from Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, estimate the rate of high school athletes who play too soon after a concussion to be very high - 40.5 percent. While the numbers likely vary in different school districts, we at the Lexington Education Foundation recognize that it is vital to ensure that student athletes are fully cured before they are allowed to return to play.
We have funded a program through the Lexington High School athletic department that assesses every one of the school's student athletes who participate in an impact sport, and establishes a protocol for recovery from head injury. Concussion screening and baseline tests are used to determine safer return-to-play decisions, allowing students to return to normal performance levels both in the classroom and on the playing field.
We hope that this pilot program becomes a permanent part of the sports program in our town, and encourage other towns to enact such programs. Caring for our youth, on and off the field, must be a priority of every community.
Elisabeth Donahue
Deborah Rourke
Lexington
The writers are copresidents of the Lexington Education Foundation.