I’ve seen this play out many times during my career. We focus on the immediate mission of making the policy changes and we leave development of the implementation details until later.
The Texas Education Agency (TEA) is now able to develop the implementation details surrounding the new post-concussion Return to School law mandated by SB 2398, and that is a great place to be. There are so many important details for the TEA to consider: What will the post-concussion academic accommodation look like? How will those accommodations be communicated to the individual schools? How will the schools apply the accommodations? and many others.
As daunting as those questions seem today, it’s also an exciting time in the evolution of the new post-concussion Return to School law. The TEA is creating the foundation upon which the student post-concussion accommodations law will grow, and that represents an opportunity to shape the future in important ways.
One thing we know for certain is that students recovering from concussions, and other brain injuries, need academic accommodation during their recovery, and that the new law mandating the development of those accommodations will become a part of the fabric of services offered by the TEA to Texas students.
An inherent reality about foundations is that they can be constructed well or constructed poorly. This is true whether we’re talking about personal moral foundations, or the foundations of the new Return to School law. What we have confidence about is that the foundations of this new Return to School law will be strong, solid, and able to hold the structure that will be built upon it. In other words, we are building a foundation today that will support the new post-concussion Return to School program for decades to come.
