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Committee sends bill to floor requiring sudden cardiac arrest awareness materials for parents and athletes
Summary
House Bill 313, which asks schools to provide sudden cardiac arrest awareness training/materials to parents, coaches and athletes and to document parental acknowledgement, passed the committee by roll call 8–5 with two absent.
House Bill 313, a rewrite of an earlier proposal, was sent to the House floor with a due-pass recommendation after a roll-call vote that the committee clerk recorded as 8 in favor, 5 against and 2 absent.
Representative Josh Wheeler (District 35), sponsor of the bill, said HB 313 updates prior work and partners with the Idaho High School Activities Association and athletic trainers to provide consistent sudden cardiac arrest awareness to coaches, parents and student athletes. “What it will do is it will provide a consistent standard for providing this training on sudden cardiac arrest awareness to both coaches and parents,” Wheeler said.
Representative Healy, who described the medical context for the bill, explained that sudden cardiac events in young athletes are often due to undetected conditions such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, long QT syndromes or congenital coronary abnormalities. “You know, these young people are worth saving. Anybody's worth saving. And an AED is just such a simple way to do it. Anybody can use it,” Healy said.
Sponsor and stakeholders told the committee the bill was crafted to be budget neutral: training materials are developed by private organizations (the sponsor named Simon's Heart) and used by the Idaho High School Activities Association, rather than requiring new state funding. The bill also contains a civil‑liability provision that limits coach liability except where a coach “is found to have acted unreasonably in a grossly negligent or reckless manner.”
Several members opposed the bill on philosophical grounds or for concerns about government expansion and a parental‑mandate component; Representative Thompson and others said they supported wider AED availability but objected to requiring parents to complete training. Sponsor Wheeler and others said the bill primarily asks parents to acknowledge receipt and review of the training materials similar to existing concussion‑education acknowledgements.
The committee approved the motion to send HB 313 to the floor by roll call (8–5, 2 absent).
