FORT WORTH, Texas \u2014\u00a0This fall, Texas public and private schools will be healthier and more heart-prepared \u2014 or at least they should be.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Senate Bill 865, also known as the Landon Payton Act, requires schools to have a Cardiac Emergency Response Plan, CPR and AED certification for certain employees, and conduct drills to test their emergency response.<\/p>\n
While Fort Worth Independent School District students at South Hi Mount Elementary got excited about their Kids Heart Challenge kick-off,\u00a0Sarah Thieroff made sure staff at another Fort Worth campus knew how to react in the case of a sudden cardiac arrest.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve had many, many school districts reach out,\u00a0especially since Senate Bill 865 passed but to date we have 29\u00a0Heart\u00a0Safe school Districts that have gone through the full\u00a0Heart\u00a0Safe designation process just in our program at Cook Children\u2019s,\u201d\u00a0said Thieroff, Project ADAM (Automated Defibrillators in Adam\u2019s Memory) Texas program coordinator at Cook Children\u2019s Medical Center-Fort Worth.<\/p>\n
Project ADAM is named after 17-year-old Adam Lemel, who died in 1999 after collapsing during a high school basketball game.<\/p>\n
The school at the time didn\u2019t have an emergency team or an AED, also known as an automated external defibrillator.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, the story could have ended there in 1999, but Adam\u2019s parents, Patty and Joe Lemel, went to Children\u2019s Hospital Wisconsin and said, \u2018We don\u2019t want our son\u2019s story to end here. We want to go on; we want to help others across the country have a reversed process and a plan in place,\u2019\u201d said Thieroff.<\/p>\n
Project ADAM is in over half the states across the country, providing free cardiac emergency preparedness resources and training to schools and communities.<\/p>\n
\u201cOver 23,000 children suffer an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest,\u201d said Hilda Colunga, community impact director at the American Heart Association.<\/p>\n
In 2024, 14-year-old Landon Payton died after the AED at his Houston middle school wasn\u2019t working.<\/p>\n
This led to legislation signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott last fall, requiring all Texas public and private schools to have a Cardiac Emergency Response Plan, mandated CPR and AED certification for certain employees, and drills to test emergency response.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone always thinks it starts with the nurses, nurse\u2019s assistants, and our athletic and PE coaches, and that is not the case. It\u2019s everybody\u2019s responsibility in our district. All the way from our students to every staff member as well,\u201d said Dr. Karen Molinar, the Fort Worth ISD superintendent.<\/p>\n
By fall 2026, all Texas schools should follow this new law.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s interesting about Landon Payton is that with that Act, we\u2019ve been trying ever since 1999 to get schools to have a team, have a plan, do a drill but now that the senate bill requires it, schools have to do it to be compliant. So that really helps our case. Because now it\u2019s no longer put on the bottom of the to-do list. It is a priority now because they have to do it to become compliant with the Senate,\u201d said Thieroff.<\/p>\n
Cook Children\u2019s said it currently has more than 800 Heart Safe schools and 29 Heart Safe School Districts in its Project ADAM program. Texas has more than 9,000 public schools and more than 1200 public school districts.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FORT WORTH, Texas \u2014\u00a0This fall, Texas public and private schools will be healthier and more heart-prepared \u2014 or…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":166808,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[836,5176,2160,132,134,133,8455,1570,102,163,138,223,82,27,1569,2053,835],"class_list":{"0":"post-166807","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-austin","8":"tag-app-education","9":"tag-app-latest-education-stories","10":"tag-app-top-stories","11":"tag-austin","12":"tag-austin-headlines","13":"tag-austin-news","14":"tag-blessing-iwuchukwu","15":"tag-ctv","16":"tag-dallas","17":"tag-education","18":"tag-el-paso","19":"tag-news","20":"tag-san-antonio","21":"tag-texas","22":"tag-texas-what-you-need-to-know","23":"tag-top-stories","24":"tag-vod"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/166808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}