School nurses tell investigator their warnings went unheeded before Sharon football player’s catastrophic injury

Anguished nurses at Sharon High School urgently appealed to administrators in the fall of 2024 to avert a potential medical crisis by hiring a full-time athletic trainer, according to an investigative report commissioned by the school system and obtained by the Globe.

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But their repeated warnings went unheeded for months, the nurses told an investigator, and their worst fears were realized when a 15-year-old Sharon High football player, Rohan Shukla, suffered a life-shattering brain injury during the annual Thanksgiving game.

The investigative report depicts serious dysfunction throughout Sharon’s system for tracking and preventing head injuries before Shukla nearly died of a severe subdural hematoma, or brain bleed.

The portrait of dysfunction is consistent with the Globe’s reporting last year about the circumstances surrounding Shukla’s catastrophic injury, which continues to render him largely immobile and unable to speak, eat, or drink without medical assistance.

The former honor roll student, now 16, was slowly progressing in his recovery until last Thanksgiving, the one-year anniversary of his tragedy, when he suffered a setback that required him to undergo his third and fourth brain surgeries. More than three months on, he remains under care at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital.

Sharon’s school nurses were growing so frustrated by the administration’s failure to hire a full-time trainer despite their verbal warnings that they formally complained by email seven weeks before the 2024 Thanksgiving game. They raised “concerns that students are slipping through the cracks, returning to play without medical clearance, and at risk of significant brain injury,” according to the report.

Still, the job remained unfilled, and the nurses were among those deeply shaken by Shukla’s traumatic injury.

“I get emotional every time I look at this email [to school administrators] because I feel like no one listened,” nurse Karen Waitekus told Daniel Bennett, a former state secretary of public safety whose firm, Comprehensive Investigations and Consulting, conducted the district’s investigation. “We basically were shouting that something needs to happen.”

To this day, the full extent of Sharon’s deficiencies in Shukla’s case remains shrouded in secrecy. School officials have refused to address specific questions, and they spurned the Globe’s public records requests for the investigative report for nearly a year. The Globe sued the district, and school officials last week released a copy of the report that was heavily redacted.

Blacked out was every specific reference to Shukla, every conclusion drawn by Bennett’s firm, and every recommendation to correct flaws or failures that may have contributed to his devastating injury.

The redacted information could provide the public and other school districts life-or-death lessons about adhering to the best practices in protecting student-athletes from brain injuries.

The school district also sent Shukla’s parents, Abhishek Shukla and Deepika Talukdar, a copy of the report with the same redactions.

“It’s unfortunate every detail related to Rohan’s particular incident is redacted, leaving us with open questions around what transpired leading to such a severe injury,” his parents told the Globe. ”We look forward to having access to the unredacted version of these reports. We think as parents it’s our basic right to have access to the unredacted version.“

There is no indication in the unredacted sections of the 59-page report, or in the 171-page appendix, that investigators explored additional factors the Globe identified last year as possibly contributing to the severity of Shukla’s injury. Those included the school’s failure to post an ambulance at its football games as it has since done.

Only six people were interviewed in the investigation: three nurses, the football coach, the athletic director, and the principal.

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Despite the report’s limitations, it illustrates some of what went wrong while Shukla, a sophomore, was playing his first season of varsity football.

Sharon’s athletic department was in flux. The football coach, Ben Shuffain, and the athletic director, Michael Vitelli, wereboth new. Vitelli had never worked as a full-time athletic director, and he was the third person in three years to hold the position in Sharon. The district, in a cost-cutting measure, hired Vitelli to also serve as an assistant principal, a daunting task at a school with 1,161 students.

Vitelli’s inability to hire a full-time trainer led him to contract part-timers to cover the football program,but only on game days. The lack of a full-timer was “a huge issue,” he told Bennett during the investigation, and created “a big gap” in administering the concussion program.

A full-time trainer not only treats, monitors, and evaluates student-athletes but ensures the district complies with regulations governing concussion protocols and the prevention of head injuries.

Without such a trainer, Vitelli said, “We did miss things.”

Mary Alice Nathan, the school district’s nurse coordinator, said she tried to fill the gap but her workload prevented her from performing additional administrative duties.

With diminished oversight, no one reviewed Sharon’s policies and procedures on head injuries every two years, as state regulations require, the report indicates.

Meanwhile, students slipped through the cracks. Waitekus, one of the nurses, told Bennett she became aware of as many as three injured student-athletes possibly returning to play without proper clearance. That, combined with the lack of response to their verbal requests, prompted the nurses to send their Oct. 11 email.

“We were at the end of our rope,” she said.

Still, nothing changed. Shukla returned to play in the Thanksgiving game, four weeks after suffering a concussion. His parents said the school permitted him to return without requiring him to submit the proper documentation or undergo mandatory return-to-play cognitive computer testing.

The only Sharon official who has spoken publicly about the district bearing responsibility in Shukla’s case is Avi Shemtov, chair of the school committee. In a forum last year for school committee candidates, Shemtov said, “I do not believe that what happened to Rohan Shukla wasn’t preventable. I don’t think the blame lies really anywhere other than solely with the school district — that includes the School Committee and the administration — for not having a full-time athletic trainer.”

Sharon’s football team especially needed a full-time trainer’s attention during the 2024 season. Playing a difficult schedule with an extremely overmatched roster, the Eagles went winless in 11 games, losing by an average of nearly 40 points. Fourteen players missed multiple games because of injuries, and Shukla was one of six who suffered documented concussions.

The schedule “was noncompetitive and unsafe,” Shuffain told the Globe.

Sharon was playing Oliver Ames on Thanksgiving when the back of Shukla’s head crashed to the ground. He was wearing a protective shell on his helmet, one that the school recommended his parents buy. But the shell lacked protection in the spot where his helmet made impact. The school has since recommended parents buy helmet covers that offer better protection.

Shukla’s teammates later reported he also was involved in a helmet-to-helmet collision in practice just two days earlier. Yet none of Sharon’s coaches spotted the collision and no trainer was on hand to monitor the practice and evaluate him to determine if he was well enough to play on Thanksgiving.

Whether the impact contributed to the severity of his Thanksgiving injury remains unclear. He now lives in a hospital, his future uncertain.

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