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Overcast Preparing for emergencies
Oceanside High School trains students in CPR and AED
High school trains students in essential skills they need to succeed in life: math, reading, writing and more. Now Ocean-side High School is also teaching its students skills so they can save lives.
Working with the Oceanside Fire Department and the Robbie Levine Foundation, OHS is teaching students cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, and the use of automated external defibrillators, or AEDs, so they can be prepared in the event of emergencies.
“This is our 11th class that we’ve done so far,” OFD member Tom Cesiro said at an afterschool class last week. “We’re going to finish up some time in mid-May for this year. We’re hoping that by the end of May, we should have anywhere between 500 and 600 students done for this year. By June of 2012, we hope to have all four grades done.”
Having everyone in the school trained in CPR and AED is a lofty goal, and all involved admit it. But that doesn’t mean they won’t — or shouldn’t — try. “We’d love to see that happen,” said OHS Principal Mark Secaur. “We haven’t put forth a mandate, but we’re encouraging students to avail themselves of it.”
The OFD has been supplying the instructors and the dummies that students learn and practice on, while the Robbie Levine Foundation has been financing the classes.
The students who have taken the training so far are mostly athletes who were encouraged to do so by their coaches. The program was the brainchild of Jill and Dr. Craig Levine, the parents of 9-year-old Robbie Levine, a Merrick boy who died of heart failure during a baseball practice in 2005, on a field where there was no AED available. The foundation named for him, spearheaded in Robbie’s memory by his parents, has worked to get AEDs into every school, and is now focusing on getting high schoolers trained in the use of the machines as well as in CPR.
“There are 17 AEDs in the school district itself, four in [the high school] alone,” said Cesiro. “And the AEDs that they’re trained on here are the same AEDs that we have in the Fire Department, the same that are inside the back of every police car in Nassau County. So they’re all over this town.
