The former Emergency Department director at Highline Medical Center, who has been barred from providing low-cost sports physicals or volunteer coaching at Highline High School, says the district’s new athletic program leadership “is doing truly bizarre stuff.

“It is a universal problem with the athletic directors in the district,” Dr. Jim Rice declared. “I’m the poster boy for getting everybody into sync.
“The new regime is doing things that are not in the best interests of the kids. They are compromising the kids’ ability to participate in sports and attend games.”

Rice, who has been giving low-cost physicals at Highline High in Burien for 25 years, has been told by district athletic director Terri McMahan that he can no longer give low-cost physicals at Highline High. He has been charging $10-$30 for physicals for the past 25 years. The normal charge is around $140, according to one Highline parent.

Teachers and coaches have also been told they cannot directly refer students to him for a physical, according to Rice.

Rice has also been told he cannot volunteer as assistant wrestling coach at Highline when the new season starts in November.

He has been the Highline football team doctor on the sidelines during games since 1985. He took over from Dr. Alan Gunsul. That position is also is in jeopardy.

After school board members heard March 23 from a barrage of students and parents supporting Rice, board member Bernie Dorsey requested an executive session to discuss the personnel matter. Rice will be invited to the meeting.
“I hope the powers-that-be listen to the parents and students,” Rice declared. “I hope I get my job back. I really love the kids.

“Highline has been in my blood for a long time.”

Rice said the district’s athletic program has gone in the wrong direction after facing several problems last year.

The district fired Jayson Boehm, a former Highline Memorial Field substitute stadium manager, last spring after he allegedly improperly provided sports physicals and medical treatments to male Evergreen student athletes and signed a doctor’s name on a form. He was charged in December by the King County prosecutor with four counts of unlicensed practice of medicine and one count of forgery.

Boehm was also accused of touching a male boxer’s genitals during a non-school event at Evergreen.

In June, LaShawn Jamar Ferguson, a level-three sex offender was escorted off the Evergreen campus after female football team managers reported he had made inappropriate comments to them. District officials determined the man who was running spring practice had not completed a background check on Ferguson. The district rescinded an offer to the man to be Evergreen’s head football coach.

Jackie Lewis, the district’s part-time athletic director, was removed from the position and McMahan was hired as a full-time athletic coordinator. McMahan is a former Northwest region athletic director of the year. Lewis has left the district.

“They brought in new people who were given orders to clean up the district but they are not using an ounce of common sense,” Rice said.
Rice said he was told by McMahon that if the school gave him a place to conduct physicals, if Rice was found negligent, the district could be named in legal action.

“That may be farfetched but I understand it,” Rice said.
However, Rice objects that teachers and coaches have been forbidden from referring students to him for low-cost physicals. He said people who refer a patient are rarely named in a lawsuit.

“That is an absurd overreaction,” Rice added.

He noted the school is allowed to give out a list of doctors who provide physicals. His name is on the list.

Rice said he was barred from coaching because he drove several female wrestlers to a regional tournament in Sedro-Woolley.

“That is the reason I’ve been excommunicated and sent to ‘Never Volunteerland,’” Rice joked.

He said he was told that the district did not want to spend money for buses to take students to events more than 30 miles away from the district.
But the students were already signed up for the Sedro Woolley tournament so he borrowed a van from a parent, paid the entry fee and drove a vanload of girls to the tournament, according to Rice.
“They didn’t say, don’t do it so I drove them myself like I’ve been doing for 15 years,” Rice said. “I did it for the benefit of the kids.”
Since the incident, he has obtained a Class II driving license, Rice added.
District spokeswoman Catherine Carbone Rogers said the district cannot comment on personnel matters.

Highline High parents and students spoke at the board meeting Wednesday night in support of Rice.

Parent Georgia Locher said Rice has provided the low-cost physicals for 25 years. Locher noted that about 50 percent of Highline High students qualify for free or reduced lunches.

Locher also said Rice was barred from coaching because he apparently violated district policies by driving female wrestlers to a tournament in a private car.
She termed it a single, isolated incident that was perhaps “insubordination.”
“But you can’t throw out the good with the bad,” Locher declared. “I understand changes are needed because of the horrific things that have happened.”
At the March 23 board meeting, Nancy Rice, Jim Rice’s wife, said the Rice family has served the Highline district for 50 years.

Jim Rice’s dad, Jim Rice Sr., served on the school board for 36 years—the longest tenure of any Highline board member, according to Nancy Rice.
Jim Rice graduated from Highline High in 1963, she said.

Jim and Nancy Rice’s son, Casey Rice, is Highline High’s head wrestling coach.
Nancy Rice said that in 26 years working in Highline athletics, the district has never received a complaint about her husband.

Parent Marco Spani said removing Rice from Highline’s athletic programs would be “a great loss to the district. You must figure out a way to keep Jim Rice.”
Spani noted he is married to former school board member Julie Burr Spani.

Here is an article the Times/News published about Dr. Rice in January:

Burien's Dr. Jim Rice has a 10-year plan
2011-01-03
When you conjure up thoughts of an emergency room visit, it usually involves a personal experience, late at night, with a heavy dose of pain and anxiety while doctors and nurses try to help you.

Dr. Jim Rice knows those situations well after his tenure as chief of the emergency department at Highline Medical Center.

Rice is choosing to move from acute care to what he calls "less acute," in opening a family practice in Burien. He's known in the sports circle as the "doc on the field" for the Highline Pirates.

Dr. Rice inherited the job from Dr. Alan Gunsul in 1985. He will continue in that role but sparingly.

"I love the kids," he said.
He won't be too far away. His new office is located at 142nd and Ambaum Blvd. S.W.
At an age when lots of people are retiring, Rice is starting a new career in family practice. Dr. Rice is now seeing patients from infants to senior citizens. What was a career in the fast paced trauma center is now one of treating everything from asthma to arthritis. Rice is loving it.

This is more than a local boy makes good story. Rice graduated from Highline High in 1963. He came through when Lou Tice was coaching and Hugh Tice was running wild as a tailback and when Clarence Williams, a superb Renton fullback and future professional football player, was rolling over his Pirates at Highline Stadium.

Rice found out soon enough his academic skills would lead him to Tufts University, near Boston, where he earned his medical degree. He interned at Virginia Mason for a year, before two years of residency at USF-Fresno and one year on the teaching staff.

By 1978, he was ready to take on the challenge of running the ER at Highline, a job he kept until 2002. From then until this year, Dr. Rice worked "locum tenens." He filled in for doctors in ER rooms from Arizona to Grays Harbor. The pay was good but the pace was hectic.

Working ER is nothing like the popular television show. Sure there are split second decisions to be made. Of course there is drama along with grief and success.

During his residency at Fresno, a young man, about 20, stumbled into the ER, collapsing on the floor inside the door. He had a bloody shirt. A little probing beyond the spot of blood led Dr. Rice to recognize that he had been shot. In an emergency the patient is treated first and questioned later. Dr. Rice "cracked his chest," removed the 22 caliber slug, and revived the man, who eventually recovered.

"We can only figure that he was shot near enough to the ER to walk in with the bullet in his heart. "He was so lucky to have been close by," Rice said.
Dr. Rice and wife Nancy have six kids--four boys and two girls. Son Casey is the wrestling coach at Highline. Rice lends an unpaid hand to teach wrestling and to protect them from shoulder and knee injuries much like he does for the Pirate football team.

When Rice played in the '60s, the field was mud and grass during the season. Technology has made it better for the fans, who can read the team numbers, but not necessarily for the athletes.
"Mud and grass was easier on the body," Rice said. There are more injuries now on the artificial turf because the players are bigger, they run faster, and have better traction.

Rice gave up the trauma center in favor of the slower paced world of family medicine. With Dr. Roger Larson and his daughter Margaret, an ARNP, Dr. Rice advises his patients in a different manner today. You don't have to hurry now, Jim has a 10-year plan.