February 12, 2016
By Paul Joseph, Paragon Communications News Director –
Several area, western Oklahoma high schools have received the invaluable usage of CPR training kits in order to – both – meet graduation requirements as well as the acquiring the knowledge to help save a life.
Area school district leaders recently joined AllianceHealth Clinton and the American Heart Association (AHA) to highlight a new state law requiring CPR training in Oklahoma schools.
As part of the AHA’s CPR in Schools Program, schools will receive a CPR training kit for use on school campus that will be shared among participating schools in Western Oklahoma. The kits have been made possible through an $86,000 contribution from AllianceHealth Oklahoma to help fund AHA’s CPR in Schools program across Oklahoma in locations where AllianceHealth hospitals are located.
Arapaho-Butler School District Superintendent Jay Edelen (ED-lynn) says his students were the first to use the approximately $7-thousand dollar piece of equipment before passing it on to the next district.
As part of the statewide initiative, AllianceHealth Oklahoma’s contribution has funded 20 CPR training kits that have been given to nine school districts in Oklahoma as part of Oklahoma’s CPR in Schools program.
AllianceHealth spokesperson, Sarah Logan, says Arapaho-Butler was one of three districts to attend a recent presentation of the kits. She says district leaders from Sentinel and Canute were also in attendance.
Edelen says his district is done with the kits for this year and will be back next year about this same time to pick them up again.
According to an AllianceHealth Oklahoma press release, teaching students CPR before they graduate will put qualified “lifesavers” in the community, year after year. It also says that AllianceHealth is thrilled to be part of those efforts as it continues their support of the American Heart Association.”
More than 326,000 people experience cardiac arrest outside of a hospital each year. About 90 percent of those victims die, often because bystanders don’t know how to start CPR or are afraid they’ll do something wrong.
Edelen says the opportunity to use the kit was a success for his district students and it enabled the district to meet the state requirements easily and economically.
Oklahoma requires CPR training for all graduating high school students starting this year. The CPR in Schools bill (HB 1378) was signed into law in May of 2014 making Oklahoma the 16th state to implement the graduation requirement. Central Oklahoma has 224 high schools with over 38,000 seniors that will be CPR-trained on an annual basis.
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