4
T he C olumbia P ress
June 15, 2018
Student athletes
will have new
rules next year
The Columbia Press
Warrenton High School will
change athlete regulations in the
fall, imposing a policy designed to
be more helpful for students with
drug, alcohol and other behavioral
problems.
“We were, A, letting kids get
away with a lot and, B, when kids
did get into trouble, we weren’t
helping them enough,” Athletic
Director Robert Hoepfl told the
school board Wednesday night.
The high school’s current poli-
cy punishes a student by kicking
him or her off the team with no
second chance.
“What we noticed, almost
uniformly, is when they’re re-
moved from a team, it definitely
had a negative impact on their
grades,” Hoepfl said. A student
might simply fall further into
the bad behavior, spending his
or her newfound free time with
the wrong crowd.
Another problem with the old
policy is that the consequence
for bad behavior only applied to
the athlete’s current sport sea-
son.
A football player who goes on
a drinking binge the last week of
the season would be kicked off
the team, but could then jump
right onto a winter sport that
started a week or two later. The
new policy wouldn’t allow that.
An infraction will cause a stu-
dent to miss 20 percent of their
current sports season. If the sea-
son has less than 20 percent of
games remaining, the suspen-
sion will carry over to the next
sport.
For a student to return to play,
they must take a drug and al-
cohol assessment with a health
care provider and write an
apology letter to their team and
coach.
A second infraction will cause
them to miss 50 percent of an
athletic season and additional
remediation is required.
A third infraction suspends
them from sports for 365 days.
A fourth infraction results in
no more athletics.