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In a special called Friday meeting that lasted three hours, 45 minutes, the Kentucky Board of Education voted unanimously (10-0) to authorize the Kentucky Department of Education to develop and send written communication to the KHSAA Board of Control with recommendations for the health and safety of athletes in high-contact sports.
What the Kentucky BOE did not vote on, or even consider, was canceling or postponing the KHSAA board’s current plan to begin fall sports competition Sept. 7, with the first football games to be played on Sept. 11 — a decision Gov. Andy Beshear said on Monday he would not overturn.
The green light remains green, for now, amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
“We needed this meeting, and we needed this conversation,” Kentucky Board of Education chair Lu Young said. “We’ll work hand in hand with the KHSAA moving forward.”
This comes on the heels of reports posted Wednesday night, first attributed to WPSD-Paducah sports director Allen Wells, claiming that the purpose of Friday’s meeting would be to overturn the KHSAA board’s decision to play fall sports.
Subsequently, on Thursday morning the KDE was inundated with thousands of forms of communications — including some threats — from individuals throughout Kentucky in support of the KHSAA’s decision to proceed with fall sports.
By midday Thursday, interim Kentucky education commissioner Kevin Brown stated that the purpose of the meeting was not to cancel or postpone the fall season, but to cover health concerns over playing this fall and, perhaps, pass along recommendations to the KHSAA board.
Among those featured on Friday’s agenda were KHSAA commissioner Julian Tackett, Kentucky Department for Public Health commissioner Dr. Steven Stack and select school superintendents from various parts of the commonwealth.
“It’s a balancing act,” Tackett told the board. “We’re committed to letting those (districts) who can start, start. All we’re doing is opening a pathway. If you decide to start, come on down — individual opportunity is a hallmark of what we do.
“Everyone has a passionate interest in sports, we just want to do it safely. This is not a play-at-all costs situation … but we have to coexist with COVID. Football is not a low-risk sport, even without COVID.”
Stack, while acknowledging the need to balance activities, was clearly cautionary.
“This is a rapidly changing situation — it’s complicated,” Stack said. “You can find an article to make any case you want to make, but where social-distancing doesn’t happen, disease spreads.
“I think sports is inseparable from school, I know the benefits, (but) I do think we err on the side of caution with kids. There is a place for sports — it’s not if, but when. This is hard because there’s so much uncertainty.
“It would have made sense to me to differentiate between low-contact sports and high-contact sports — I would be thoughtful about the degree of contact.”
Superintendents, meanwhile, urged greater collaboration and unification between the various education, health and athletic entities in the state with regard to the message being sent to the public, henceforth.
Tackett acknowledged the challenge ahead.
“The most difficult part of all this is that there are no guarantees,” Tackett said, “but five of our seven neighboring states are playing interscholastic football, and 48 of our (120) counties touch another state.
“We believe if sports is to be played anywhere, (the KHSAA is) the safest place it can be played.”
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