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Robbie Levine Foundation to provide CPR/AED training
Within six years, every student in the Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District should know how to save a life with cardiopulmonary resuscitation or an automated external defibrillator.
That’s the hope of Merokean Jill Levine, executive director of Forever Nine: the Robbie Levine Foundation, a nonprofit organization that raises funds to equip school ball fields with AEDs and provide CPR/AED training to youth sports organizations.
Levine began Forever Nine in the spring of 2006, only months after her son, Robbie, died on a Little League baseball field at Levy-Lakeside Elementary School in Merrick. As he rounded the bases, his heart simply stopped beating. Levine’s husband, Craig, an oral surgeon, performed CPR on his son, but there wasn’t an AED nearby. Robbie could not be saved.
Since then, Jill and Craig Levine have raised tens of thousands of dollars through Forever Nine to have AEDs installed at as many ball fields as possible. Now, Jill Levine said, she is hoping to expand the foundation’s reach to provide CPR/AED training in Bellmore-Merrick schools and beyond.
In conjunction with the Bellmore-Merrick Central District and the Bellmore-Merrick Community Parent Center, Forever Nine is piloting a CPR/AED training course at Merrick Avenue Middle School, which will be taught over three days during phys. ed. classes.
“There’s no downside to this,” said Saul Lerner, the district’s director of health, physical education and athletics.
Kayla Babbush, a senior at Kennedy High School in Bellmore, offers CPR/AED training to Central District students after school on behalf of the Robbie Levine Foundation, but the program, called “Teens for Life,” is optional and does not reach all students. The objective now is to ensure that every student in grades seven to 12 receives the training, Levine said.
There are AEDs in every Central District school, a number of which have been provided by Forever Nine, and school coaches and nurses are trained in their use. But the majority of students –– and many faculty members –– are not. AEDs “don’t do any good if you don’t know how to use them,” Levine said.
