PORT RICHMOND — Port Richmond High School is launching a program to teach every student life-saving skills.
The school will become the city's first "CPR Smart School" and include the training in health and physical education curriculums, Borough President James Oddo said.
"This program is a great educational opportunity for our students and will give them the chance to learn life-saving techniques,” Oddo said in a statement. “We hope this will inspire other Staten Island high schools to follow suit and get CPR training resources for their students.”
The American Heart Association donated several kits to the school to train multiple students at the same time in Hands-Only CPR — a method of CPR developed by the group that uses just hands instead of mouth-to-mouth breathing.
The less than 30-minute training sessions for students teaches them how identify a person in cardiac arrest and use an automated external defibrillator, a device that checks heart rhythm and sends an electric shock to normalize it.
More than 325,000 people get cardiac arrests outside of a hospital each year and around 90 percent of them die from it, according to the American Heart Association. Using CPR immediately after it starts can double or triple a person's chance at survival, according to the AHA.
