During their latest drill, the AED team, founded in order to ensure the safety and security of students and staff members on campus, arrived at the scene of a emergency simulation to find a live actor.

“What made yesterday’s drill different than anything we’d ever done was, number one, we used a real person and a mannequin which we had never done before,” assistant principal John King said. “Our teachers have gotten really good at being able to respond and do all the steps that we go through in a very timely manner. We give them lots of information which, to be honest, in a real situation they’re not going to get that information.”

According to the American Heart Association, an automatic external defibrillator (AED) machine is a lightweight, portable device that delivers an electric shock through the chest to the heart. The shock can potentially stop an irregular heartbeat (arrhythmia) and allow a normal rhythm to resume following sudden cardiac arrest (SCA). There are AED machines placed in various locations around the school, and there is almost always a staff member nearby trained to use them.

“Just like our armed staff, it’s taking [the well-being of students] into my own hands,” AED team member Brett Vaughn said.

The AED team is made up entirely of volunteers who offer to give up their time in order to train for the AED response team.

“Mr. King actually wanted to get a representative from each hallway,” nurse Sherrie Thompson said.  “We sent an email out saying that we were going to do this, and we needed someone to represent each hallway. We got great responses back and went ahead and invited the people who said they were interested, and we happened to need only one more person.”

During the usual AED drill, team members were called over the intercom to report to the auditorium. There they found a dummy with a piece of paper taped to its chest detailing the symptoms the supposed person was experiencing.

“We wanted to continue to have the group actually put the AED machine on the mannequin because that’s what the AED is really for,” King said.’When someone’s not breathing, they do not have a pulse, and we need to assess whether they need have their heart shocked. We did a mannequin yesterday but we also had a real person, Logan Burchett, volunteer to pretend he was having a seizure.”

Burchett provided a sense of realism to the drill, as well as a chance for the team to learn to gather information from their surroundings and apply it to the situation.

“Coach King and the nurse came in Friday said they needed a volunteer to act like they were having a seizure,” Burchett said. “I actually have had two seizures before, so they thought I would be the perfect volunteer.”

In the future, the AED team will continue performing regular drills, all in the name of keeping the school safe.

“You never know when an event is going to take place,” King said. “It could happen in a classroom, it could happen in a sporting field, it could happen back in the band area, so we wanted to someone from all parts of the building trained and ready to go into action if called upon.”