Families gathered at Florida State College at Jacksonville’s downtown campus Saturday for a community wellness event that offered a variety of health services, including free EKG screenings for children and young adults.<\/p>\n
The screenings come ahead of Florida’s Second Chance Act, a new law set to take effect July 1. The law requires EKG screenings for incoming ninth-grade student-athletes and first-time high school athletes before they can participate in school sports.<\/p>\n
Among those taking advantage of the free screenings was Teresa Radicevich, who brought her son. He will be a freshman this fall and participates in football, basketball and track.<\/p>\n
“I think it\u2019s important for parents to know,” Radicevich said. “Make sure their kids are healthy because you know when you do your standard yearly physical, and EKG is not included.”<\/p>\n
Radicevich said she’s a fan of the new law, and immediately signed her son up for a screening.<\/p>\n
“Well, as soon as I heard that they were passing a law that this was required, it made my heart very happy,” said Radicevich.<\/p>\n
She also encouraged other parents to consider getting their children screened.<\/p>\n
“You hear these stories about these, you know, tragedies and it\u2019s just heartbreaking as a mother, and so we immediately signed up to get this done,” Radicevich said.<\/p>\n
Organizers say EKG screenings can help identify underlying heart conditions that may otherwise go undetected, potentially preventing life-threatening emergencies among young athletes.<\/p>\n
For Radicevich, the screening offered peace of mind before her son begins high school sports.<\/p>\n
“Making sure that your child is healthy when they\u2019re playing any sport is the main concern because you don\u2019t wanna see anybody get hurt,” she said.<\/p>\n
The new screening requirement takes effect July 1 for eligible student-athletes across Florida.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Families gathered at Florida State College at Jacksonville’s downtown campus Saturday for a community wellness event that offered…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":314329,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[130801,28,30,29,130802,130800,130803],"class_list":["post-314328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-ekg","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news","tag-free-screenings","tag-teresa-radicevich","tag-young-athletes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=314328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314328\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/314329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=314328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=314328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=314328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}