A Utah school district is reassessing how it cares for athletes after concussions

Provo • Nathan Bos suffered this third major concussion in as many years near the end of his freshman year at Westlake High School during a rugby match. He was already intimately familiar with the symptoms, but this time there was no going back.

Bos, now 18, was told by doctors that he would never again be cleared to play contact sports. He felt the effects of that third concussion — his worst, he says — through the end of his high school years. He had severe short-term memory loss and insomnia. His grades plummeted. He suffered from anxiety and depression, for which he took medication.

Bos said he feels that had there been a comprehensive system in place that helped students recover from a concussion and return to form academically as well as athletically, his teachers would have been able to help him instead of, as he termed it, “grasping at straws.”

“It was just a really bad situation,” Bos said Friday.

But now, such a system exists. Intermountain Healthcare partnered with the Alpine School District to create the Return-to-Learn program — a set of protocols that maps out academic benchmarks a student should reach while recovering from a concussion.

The protocols, unveiled at BYU during the first annual Intermountain Healthcare Concussion Conference, consist of five stages of gradual steps aiming to get a student back to full class attendance. The stages include a post-concussion symptom scale that’s meant for daily tracking of a student’s symptoms.

Alpine School District is the first in the state to adopt the new protocols. Mickelle Bos, assistant principal at Mountain View High School and Nathan’s mother, first thought of creating learning-specific concussion protocols while her son was suffering from the symptoms of his.

“Watching my son struggle highlighted for me the need to create a comprehensive program that would help teachers, parents and students with the learning challenges that come with concussion,” Mickell Bos said.

The Utah High School Activities Association has its own concussion policy for sports. Individual school districts, such as Granite and Canyons, have similar policies. Coaches and teachers must receive training in concussions and treatment for them.

But Mickelle Bos thinks those policies are missing the academic component to recovery, which is why she started exploring the idea. She said at Alpine high schools, more than 200 students were diagnosed with concussions. All of those, she said, were related to athletics.

“There has been a missing piece, for sure,” Mickelle Bos said. “And that is how to address it on the academic side.”

Two of Bos’ three concussions came when he wasn’t involved in a team sport. One was when he was on his bicycle in 7th grade. It began to rain and he ran into the back of a vehicle. The second was a year later while he was tubing in Lake Powell. He and his cousin accidentally bumped heads, causing him to break his jaw.

“Each one of those just made school harder and harder,” Bos said. He added that the short-term memory loss, chronic headaches, and depression and anxiety started with those injuries, only to be exacerbated when he hurt his head a third time.

Darren Campbell, a sports medicine physician at Intermountain Utah Valley Sports Medicine Clinic, said he sees more non-sports concussions in his practice. He helped Mickelle Bos get the new protocols at Alpine off the ground.

“As we’ve taken care of concussions for a while, we’ve recognized the need for a multispecial approach,” Campbell said.

Campbell hosted the inaugural conference. He said he hopes other school districts across the state adopt the protocol.

“By having them adopt these principles and use their education expertise, they can really make a difference,” Campbell said. “So I would love to see this adopted by other schools. I would love this to be a state policy.”