Texas Border Business
Mission CISD will be installing an Automatic External Defibrillator (AED) in all elementary gymnasiums. Currently campuses have one AED located by the nurse’s office at each of the campuses. The second AED will help in making it quicker to respond in case of emergency. The district has been leading the way in ensuring the safety of our students, staff and parents since 2003 when the first batch of AED’ s were installed on our campuses.
“When we initiated Project Adam which is an assessment of mock drills,” states Yeseńia Treviño, Health Services Coordinator. “We discovered that in order to reduce the prolonged response time we had to make sure we had a second AED on campus. We know every minute is crucial during an emergency and if we can reduce that response time by 3 to 4 minutes then we can save lives.”
Currently the district’s secondary campuses have two life-saving devices on site and with this new initiative the elementary campuses will too. In addition to purchasing the devices, the district has assured that staff members at each campus are trained on how to use the AED and also in CPR. The AED’s are about the size of a laptop computer. They are designed to automatically analyze heart rhythms and deliver an electric current to the heart of a cardiac arrest victim.
The American Heart Association says on average about 1,300 Americans die every day due to sudden cardiac arrest. They also report that studies repeatedly show the importance of immediate bystander CPR plus defibrillation within 3-5 minutes of collapse improves survival from sudden cardiac arrest.
