[Tristan Lall]

I see a couple possible approaches to recognizing safety. You could recognize good contingency planning, and/or you could recognize an actual history of safety. I wonder if an emphasis on the former in the award structure causes teams which have achieved the latter to be just a little resentful.

In industrial practice, it's common to highlight achievements like "400 days without a lost time accident". This sort of milestone is notable, because plant workers and management are aware of the risks of their work, and take pride (or profit, if you prefer) in their success in avoiding mishaps. If anything is truly deserving of recognition, it's demonstrable success in achieving more favourable safety outcomes than would be expected in a similar line of work—while still getting the job done.

But are our schools ready for that kind of thinking? I doubt it. To count days between lost time accidents (to pick a metric arbitrarily), you have to acknowledge that such accidents are reasonably likely. Even in activities that enjoy the unreserved support of school communities—high school football, to use the obvious example—the risk of bodily harm is downplayed or perhaps misunderstood. And I would be very surprised if school boards systematically collect and analyze the rates of injury among different teams, in order to correlate coaching strategies with degrees of harm (even though it's very possible that doing this would improve safety across the board).

Much more likely, the policies are driven by significant traumatic events, like a kid being dropped on his head during a wrestling match, or a robotics student losing a fingertip. That sort of reactionary approach to policy tends to either drive people to unsustainable extremes ("no power tools, ever, that way nobody will lose a finger"), or induces people to downplay incidents ("this could be the incident over which the school board shuts us down—so keep quiet").

So having said that, what would I do about the safety award? Maybe start by having a conversation (right here, for example) about what the right metric is—and make no mistake, I presuppose that this award should be about an ongoing and measurable statistic, rather than the number of tokens accumulated over an event. However, I'm concerned about the huge practical difficulties of obtaining statistics about team mishaps. I'm just not sure how to make the award relevant in the big picture without this kind of data.

Let's assume, however, that we've established statistical criteria and can therefore offer the award. I'd open the award only to teams that share the data needed to judge them fairly against their peers. (I would mean for a little bit of shame to be implied when your team is listed as ineligible for the award.) I only hope that there are enough respondents to present the award at the regional level...if not, that's a way to shave 8 min each from fifty-something closing ceremonies.

It seems my hypothetical safety award is hinging on some perhaps-unreasonable assumptions about being able to collect meaningful data. Given that I don't think the status quo is doing all that much good, I'd say that regretfully, the next best thing to an improved safety award is not to present it at all.

Finally, if a team had a particular safety innovation that, while fascinating and unique, wasn't shown to be measurably effective in increasing safety (yet), there's always a judges' award for that (whether or not a safety award exists).