Love Your Garden

he could have died if they’d waited even a couple more minutes.

In fact, a victim’s chance of surviving this type of cardiac arrest “drops by 10 percent for every minute a normal heartbeat is not restored,” according to the American Heart Association.

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Doctors outfitted Joe with a pacemaker, the teen was back at school before Christmas break.

“I don’t remember anything, really,” Joe says. His friends filled him in when he returned to school.

Coach Titsworth, nurse Young and administrator Love are part of their school’s emergency response team. At every Richardson ISD campus, teams of five-to-10 staffers, usually front office personnel and coaches, are specifically trained for critical situations, explains Richardson ISD special assignments nurse Alicia Whitehead, who has coordinated CPR and first aid training for district employees for 11 years.

“We take it very seriously,” she says of the emergency response program, “because we want our students to be safe.”

When the A.E.D. rule went into effect, it wasn’t easy to implement.

“They made the law, but did not provide the funds,” she says. She points to one model that costs about $1,400, explaining that price varies for sizes (the A.E.D.s in elementary schools are smaller, for example).

Still, the district allocates money not only to place and maintain the requisite A.E.D.s in every school (five high schools, eight middle schools and 41 elementary schools) but also to add multiple devices in the bigger campuses and even more at the high schools.

In district sports, team managers carry portable A.E.D.s. Choir and band directors carry them when the groups travel.

“We are required by law to check each once a month, but we check them daily,” Whitehead says.

The devices are stored in recessed, reachable cabinets, usually in school hallways, outside a nurse station or the gym. Bright, visible signs, posted around campuses, advertise A.E.D. locations.

Though several employees at each school are trained to use an A.E.D., the machine is user friendly even for a layperson in an emergency.

“It talks to you. It tells you what to do,” Whitehead says. “We want them to be accessible, even if it’s at an event after hours and the nurse is not around.”

Considering that sudden cardiac arrest is by far the leading cause of death in student athletes, one would think every school in the nation would take A.E.D.s and training as seriously as RISD.

But that isn’t the case, according to an article last April in the New York Times:

“Many [A.E.D.s] are locked up in an office and not accessible, or only the school nurse knows how to use it,” Fort Worth mom Laura Friend tells the paper. Friend lobbied for the A.E.D. law after losing her daughter to cardiac arrest in 2004, and she created a nonprofit that has donated A.E.D.s and provided training throughout Texas.

Dr. Jonathan Drezner, director of the Center for Sports Cardiology at the University of Washington, told the Times