Staff Writer
Richmond County school board members say they unknowingly cut ambulance service out of their budget. Now they are looking to restore the emergency care to student athletes.
This summer the board approved a budget, cutting more than $5 million, including about $50,000 for ambulances, but some board members said they didn't know about the cut until after football season began and athletic trainers expressed concerns.
"I just got aggravated because, again, you're finding out accidentally," board member Helen Minchew said Wednesday. "I would have liked to know about this ahead of time and discussed it."
Director of Public Safety Julia Porter-Stein told the board Tuesday that she was told to cut her budget, so she did, adding that the decision to cut ambulance service wasn't a hasty one.
All of the county's stadiums are within two miles of fire stations, which are staffed with emergency medical technicians, she said. She will make another report to the board tonight.
Board members aren't the only ones concerned about the cost-saving measure's impact on student safety.
"I was a little concerned," said Steven Greer, the director of Primary Care Sports Medicine at Medical College of Georgia Hospital and Clinics. "Why did they do that?"
Dr. Greer said his athletic trainers, who staff home games, can handle most injuries but aren't equipped to deal with catastrophic accidents, where response time is crucial.
"My personal opinion is that it's very important" to have ambulances at games, he said. "Football is not the safest sport on the planet."
Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, has done extensive research on sports injuries with funding from the Centers for Disease Control.
It has found that football is the leading cause of sports-related injuries, with a rate twice that of basketball. During the 2005-06 football season, there were 517,726 injuries among high school players. Of those, 11.5 percent were face and head injuries and 4.1 percent were neck and cervical spine injuries, most of which were muscle strains.
On Tuesday, school board President Jimmy Atkins urged his fellow board members to remedy the situation promptly.
"I never recall -- and from the response I got from of the others, I don't think anyone really realized -- that this was an item being deleted from the budget," Mr. Atkins said during committee meetings. "Hopefully, we will never need that ambulance service and it's just sitting there, but when we have a child on that football field who gets severely injured, every one of us sitting at this table is going to wish they were there on hand."
Reach Greg Gelpi at (706) 828-3851 or greg.gelpi@augustachronicle.com.
WHAT'S NEXT?
Tonight, the Richmond County school board could vote to restore ambulance service or take other action to protect student athletes. The meeting is to begin at 6.
