Board reviews cardiac emergency plan and a proposal to add AEDs to buses; vendor demonstrates smart defibrillator

Dr. Don Gresham, the district’s director of special services, presented a cardiac emergency response plan the board will review annually and described proposed equipment purchases to meet the plan’s time-to-shock requirements under Senate Bill 19.

The plan requires registered AED locations, annual drills, a designated cardiac emergency response team at each building, monthly AED checks and trained responders. “The cardiac emergency response plan ensures that we are able to recognize the cardiac emergency, obtain the AED, get it back to that person, and have it on within 3 minutes,” Dr. Gresham said.

Staff said district nurses currently provide AED training to staff at no charge, but full CPR certification for staff typically carries a per-person cost and scheduling burden; board members discussed whether a lead nurse or stipend should centralize monthly AED checks for approximately 105 units the district is proposing. One staff estimate presented was 35 current units plus additional replacements and about 70 more units for transportation, yielding roughly 105 devices in total; staff said the final purchase list and costs would be presented to the board for action.

The vendor, Dwayne Billinger, showed a demonstration unit that walked users through pad placement, included a child/adult selection button (removing the need for separate pediatric pads) and provided real-time CPR quality feedback (a metronome and compression-depth monitoring). “It tells us to push harder... Good compression,” Billinger said during the demonstration. Staff noted the new model’s ongoing maintenance estimate would be roughly $72 per unit per year versus about $167 per unit per year for some current devices, and that the unit stores event data that can be downloaded for clinical review.

Discussion points included where AEDs will be staged for off-campus events (staff recommended portable placement on buses and temporary placement at athletic sites), a recommendation to improve signage identifying AED locations, and how to handle routine monthly checks across many devices. Fire district representatives and the vendor confirmed AEDs can be registered with dispatching services (staff said they use PulsePoint) so 911 dispatchers can direct rescuers to nearby units.

Board members questioned who will be CPR-certified, how the district will pay for broader CPR training, and whether the plan had outside clinical review. Staff said the plan drew on templates from the American Heart Association and the American Red Cross and that they would seek additional peer review if the board preferred.

Ending — Staff will return to the board with detailed cost and purchase recommendations for districtwide AED replacement and bus units; no purchase vote was taken at this meeting.