As she looks over a crowd of students at the Nov. 1 Career Day, senior Rebecca Lorigan demonstrates how to perform CPR, interlocking her left and right hand at a perfect 90 degrees. According to Lorigan, who first became CPR- and AED-certified when she was 13, knowing these skills can save a life.
“It’s really beneficial for everyone to get certified,” she said. “Especially if you want to work with kids, you should definitely get certified because you never know what’s going to happen.”
A “Roar” survey* involving over 400 students revealed that Lorigan is part of the 8% of CPR-certified students on campus. The remaining 49% have experience, and 43% have never practiced.
Knowing how to perform CPR and use an automated external defibrillator (AED) can help prevent casualties due to sudden cardiac arrest (SCA). The leading cause of death on school campuses and among student-athletes, SCA occurs when the heart stops beating. It can lead to unconsciousness and fatality within minutes.
While the American Heart Association states that SCA affects nearly “23,000 people under the age of 18 … annually,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that only one in ten victims survive.
To save someone from an SCA, rescuers must assess the scene for safety, and check if the victim has a pulse and is breathing; if not, they should immediately call 911, start CPR and send someone to bring an AED.
Once the on button is pressed, the AED gives the user directions and analyzes the victim’s heart rhythm to deliver an electric shock. If the rescuer uses an AED within the first minute, the victim’s survival rate is 90%. However, this percentage decreases by 10% each minute a shock is not delivered.
“Look at our campus,” Athletic Director Tony Riopelle said. “It’s so huge, you can’t just have one AED. For a while, we just had one [AED] here in guidance. Well, what if something happens out at the soccer field or the track? Every second counts at that point.”
West Shore has three AEDs on campus — in the guidance office, gym and Athletic Trainer Megan Morr’s office — and three portable AEDs for coaches to carry to games and practices. In the past two years, the district provided the school with three more AEDs designated for off-campus sports, such as golf and tennis.
Although understanding how to use an AED can save a life, knowing where to find one can matter more. In the survey, 70% of students reported they did not know where to find an AED on campus, and 85% answered they would feel uncomfortable using an AED.
Despite this, Riopelle said awareness in schools has come far since he became an educator in 1997.
“Back when I was a teacher and a coach, there was none, I mean, zero at all,” Riopelle said. “I didn’t even know what an AED machine was. Schools didn’t have AEDs. No one did ECG (electrocardiogram) tests. No one even thought of it.”
This changed after a 2007 incident at Cocoa Beach Jr./Sr. High School, when then-sophomore Rafe Maccarone collapsed during a soccer practice. Maccarone, who his teammates described as “a healthy and active athlete,” was unaware he was living with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy until he had an SCA.
As his teammates and coaches called 911 and performed CPR, two of them ran in search of an AED. A locked door prevented them from accessing an AED and a locked gate prevented an ambulance from reaching him in time.
He died the next day.
In his honor, several of Maccarone’s teammates created the non-profit organization Who We Play For (WWPF), which does affordable heart screenings on students to prevent SCA deaths. Since its founding in 2014, the organization has screened over 250,000 students and says its findings have saved over 200 lives.
In addition to making Brevard County the first in the country to require athletes to get heart screenings, WWPF has worked with the school board to have at least one AED in every school part of the Florida High School Athletic Association.
However, after his teenage daughter experienced an SCA in 2016, WWPF Impact Director Shawn Sima knew that more had to be done.
Lexi Sima, a varsity athlete at Viera High School, had left a softball game to condition at a fitness center. Thirty seconds into a light run on the treadmill, Lexi’s heart stopped working and she fell to the ground.
“Luckily for us, she collapsed in front of a guy who took CPR a couple of weeks earlier because his job required him to,” Shawn Sima said. “There were two or three other guys there that were non-medical. One of them was a retired New York cop. The other one had been a lifeguard when he was a teenager. And the gym had an AED that until a few weeks earlier had expired batteries and pads, and the owner figured it out and replaced it. My kid went down, and these people jumped into action and saved her life.”
The doctors said that she had “survived the unsurvivable.” Shawn Sima knew that if the expired AED batteries had gone unnoticed or bystanders had waited the full 15 minutes for the ambulance before doing CPR, Lexi’s story could have turned out differently.
“It changed everything for me, and I made it my mission in life to pay it forward and make sure that every family at least has the opportunity to have a survivor story,” he said. “[A] one out of 10 [survival rate] sucks, and it’s been that same number plus or minus a couple of percentage points for the last 30-plus years. What we’re doing is not working, and that’s why this is my mission, to ramrod it down the legislators’ throats and make them require it (CPR and AED training) of everybody.”
Since 2018, the Simas have worked with local and state lawmakers, starting with requiring Brevard students to have hands-on CPR experience. As of 2021, ninth and 11th grade students must have an hour-long CPR practice on a manikin to graduate.
In ninth grade, students meet this requirement by taking the Health Opportunities through Physical Education (HOPE) online class, which all students must take before graduating. However, they are not provided with manikins, leaving some to practice on pillows, stuffed animals and basketballs.
The survey reported that 34% of high schoolers did not take HOPE, as student-athletes can waive the class by playing a varsity sport during seventh and eighth grade. Of the students who did take the class, 22% said they were confident in their ability to perform CPR.
“Since I did the course online, it was a bit difficult to understand what they wanted me to do,” freshman Sonja Konicki said. “[But] after I started practicing on a stack of pillows I laid on the floor, I felt the methods were effective, especially as I still remember the steps today.”
Since then, Shawn Sima advocated more for the state. In Florida, AEDs are now required at every athletic practice and game, and coaches must be CPR- and AED-certified. On the national level, he is advocating for the Access to AEDs Act, which would give funding to schools to provide AEDs and CPR training and prepare SCA emergency response plans. As of November 2024, the bill passed the House of Representatives unanimously and is in the Senate.
To make a change, Shawn Sima said all it takes is gathering “families and crusaders who are not willing to take no for an answer.”
“What good is it if you get into Princeton if you don’t learn this simple skill, and you have somebody you love drop dead when you could have learned this skill in literally one hour,” he said. “One or two hours out of four years of high school, and it could be the most important skill you’ll ever learn.”
*The data was gathered from a Google Forms survey via fourth-period classes on Nov. 18, 2024, to 419 students, approximately half of West Shore’s students.
