The Kentucky Board of Education voted 10-0 today to authorize the Kentucky Department of Education to send a letter on behalf of the BOE to the Kentucky High School Athletic Association's Board of Control urging additional considerations of alternative options for high-contact fall sports.
Board of Education chairperson Lu Young said the alternatives will include guidance, looking at what other states are doing, and responding to the concerns the Board of Education members shared during today's meeting.
KHSAA Commissioner Julian Tackett detailed how the association came to its decision to begin fall sports competition the week of September 7.
Dr. Steven Stack, public health commissioner for Kentucky, voiced concern about high-contact sports.
"I think sports is inseparable from school," Stack said. "The kids behave similar ways, and so when I look at the sports, I see all the benefits, all the beneficial good that they bring, and I wanna to get our kids back to that. But I also know it's a time when for many of these sports there's high contact, high touch and a lot of close proximity, and we've seen sports teams, even Division I NCAA sports teams that have a heck of a lot more money than all of you put together have who couldn't manage to keep the disease out of their teams even with all of the things they were doing. So I think you have to consider how much resources does your high school or your middle school have in order to do the kinds of things that are envisioned here potentially in the KHSAA document but are already being done in other places."
Covington Independent Schools Superintendent Alvin Garrison will become a member of the KHSAA Board of Control on September 1. Garrison said he supported the KHSAA position of returning to sports in the safest way possible, but not the timing.
"I along with the group of northern Kentucky superintendents disagree with the decision to start practicing and start sports on the 24th (of August)," Garrison said. "We did not think we should start fall sports with not having in person classes or school. Me, personally, I think it sends the wrong message to our student-athletes; it places a higher emphasis on sports than school."
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