Port Jefferson athletic director Debra Ferry learned of the Virginia Tech helmet ratings after Shoreham-Wading River high school player Thomas Cutinella died as the result of a helmet-to-helmet hit during a game last season.

Ferry said she was spurred to take a closer look at her inventory. Any helmet that wasn’t rated five stars, she crossed off the list.

Ferry planned to replace those helmets with five-star helmets, but then she asked herself this question: “If this was your son, which helmet would you want on his head?” She said she struggled with the thought of giving a brand-new helmet to one student and an older — but still highly rated — helmet to another student.

She said she knew then the only option she was comfortable with was replacing Port Jefferson’s entire inventory with the best available helmets. Going that route is rare; schools typically buy about 10 new helmets per year at a cost of between $150 and $400 each.

“If you’re going to provide our kids with the top of the line, then provide all our kids with top of the line,” she said. “It’s a difficult battle to fight as an athletic director at a school district to say, ‘We’re going to implement this process slowly’ when it comes to a kid’s safety.”

She presented the information regarding the helmets, including pricing, to the Board of Education at a Dec. 9 meeting and was given the go-ahead.

The next day, records show, she bought 50 five-star helmets for $14,749.

The Oyster Bay Board of Education debated and then voted on whether to eliminate the football program at an open meeting last December.

Board member Michael Castellano, 54, a general surgeon, said his goal that day was to cancel the program because of the risk of significant injury.

Two months before the vote, Shoreham-Wading River high school football player Thomas Cutinella died after a helmet-to-helmet hit on the field.

“[Football is] a danger, with the injuries I see, the injuries I read about,” Castellano said. “I always thought it was hard to ethically pay for something that’s so dangerous to kids.”

The board voted 5-1 in favor of keeping football. Castellano was the lone dissenter.

“We listened to the community,” board member Jennifer Romeo said. “The community came forth and said they don’t want to stop football.”

Castellano said he was satisfied that he at least spurred a conversation in his community about football’s injury risk.

“I wanted to make sure everyone was aware how dangerous this sport is,” he said. “Some parents don’t realize how dangerous this sport is, what the long-term ramifications can be. I wanted to put it out there.”

Out of the discussion came a promise to spend whatever was necessary to upgrade the team’s equipment — notably the helmets.

In June, Oyster Bay purchased 85 five-star helmets from Riddell that feature a bendable forehead that is intended to absorb more impact. Inside those helmets are sensors that send a signal to a handheld device when a player receives a hit above a certain threshold of force.

The total cost was $33,915, according to the purchase order obtained by Newsday through a Freedom of Information Law request. Riddell said Oyster Bay is the first school on Long Island outfitted with these sensors.

“To me this gives us and our trainer a chance to look at all 11 players [on the field] at a given time — or all 80 or so athletes that are in our program at a given time — because they’re all going to be hooked into the system and hooked right up to the trainer,” athletic director Kevin Trentowski said. “It’s a set of eyes that goes on every athlete.”

Two weeks into the regular season, Trentowski said the biggest impact of the sensors has been allowing the school’s athletic trainer to go to other sporting events as opposed to feeling obliged to be at all of the football practices. “When she returns back to the football site the helmets alert her to players worth checking on,” he said.

Trentowski said the sensor has gone off “only a handful of times” and none of them have led to a player being diagnosed with a concussion.

On Long Island, there are 116 high schools with football programs.

Beginning in April 2015, Newsday obtained current helmet inventories from the 107 public schools through Freedom of Information Law requests. Newsday requested the same information from the nine private schools, which are not required by law to oblige. Only Long Island Lutheran provided the inventory.

Newsday also obtained concussion reporting from the 2014 football season from 102 public schools through FOIL requests. Five schools declined, citing student privacy laws. Newsday made the same request of the nine private schools. Only Long Island Lutheran and Bishop McGann-Mercy complied.

Newsday compared the helmet inventories with safety ratings that Virginia Tech researchers have been publishing since 2011.

This report is the result of a seven-month examination that included more than 80 interviews with neurologists, researchers, helmet manufacturers, Long Island superintendents, athletic directors, coaches, parents and players.

Michael O’Donnell awakened the morning of Nov. 17, 2012, ready to play in one of the biggest football games of his varsity career. What he didn’t realize is that he had already played in that game the day before.

“I woke up with a hospital bracelet on,” said O’Donnell, then the quarterback for Sachem North. “My first thought was, ‘All right, game day.’ I didn’t remember the game or that day in school.”

O’Donnell didn’t remember the hits that sent him to the hospital with a concussion, he didn’t remember passing his driver’s test a few days before and he had no idea of the grueling months of recovery that were to come.

His teammates came over that morning. “They were like, ‘You can watch the play if you want, but this will probably be the last time you watch TV for a while.’ ” he said.

In the video, O’Donnell, then a junior starting in the county semifinal against William Floyd High School, drops back to pass, gets hit helmet to helmet and, as his body drops, he takes a knee to the head. Finally, his helmet rattles against the turf. He is near the 10-yard line and he’s not moving. He is unconscious for close to a minute.

“Whenever he released the ball, as the quarterback, the first thing we looked to see was where the ball went and then we’d always look back to see where he was,” said his mother, Pam O’Donnell. “We looked back and I didn’t see him and there was a player on the ground. . . . He wasn’t moving and I knew it was my kid and I didn’t know what had happened.

“It was the scariest moment of my life.”

When O’Donnell regained consciousness, he was unsteady on his feet, but adamant he could continue playing. He walked to the wrong sideline and forgot which team Sachem North was playing. He shouted at his coaches to be put back in, “because I didn’t know what happened,” he said.

Despite O’Donnell’s pleas to go back in, the team’s athletic trainer and coaching staff would not let him return.

“He was insisting that he could go back in the game,” Pam O’Donnell said, “but the trainer knew right away that wasn’t going to happen.”

Pam and her husband, Mike, took their son to St. Charles’ Hospital in Port Jefferson, where Michael was diagnosed with a concussion. There, he repeated the same questions: Where am I? What happened? Did I get hit? Who were we playing? Was it a run or a pass?

“This went on for hours, literally hours,” Mike O’Donnell said.

Though that night is a blank space in Michael’s memory, the concussion — the days of sensory deprivation, the school time missed and the endless doctor’s visits — would come to dominate his life for the five months it took him to recover. The headaches were constant, he said, and he had extreme sensitivity to light and noise. He was out of school for 3 1/2 to four months, according to his father.

Michael, 19, now plays baseball for a club team at SUNY-Binghamton, where he is studying neuroscience. He doesn’t remember the helmet he was wearing and neither he nor his parents believe that different equipment would have made much of a difference.

“I don’t know if a different helmet would have done anything,” Pam O’Donnell said.

Michael returned to football his senior year and played safety. He said he doesn’t regret playing football.

“You know the risk,” he said. “But it’s something you accept when you walk on the field and it’s nothing I had a problem doing.”