By Dana Hess | South Dakota Searchlight
It’s not every day that a South Dakota legislator gets to save lives. That’s what members of the House Education Committee thought they were doing when they unanimously endorsed House Bill 1073.
The bill, sponsored by Rep. Mellissa Heermann, a Brookings Republican, and with the full-throated support of the American Heart Association, mandates that each school district create a cardiac emergency plan. That plan would include creating a cardiac emergency response team, placing automated external defibrillators in accessible areas on school grounds, reviewing the plan each year at each school in the district, conducting an annual drill at each school in the district and providing three hours of annual training. The bill includes $150,000 for grants for AEDs to be distributed by the state Department of Health.
Testimony in favor of the bill noted that the smaller the community, the more likely that a high school is a social center of the town as people gather for football, basketball and volleyball games. Ensuring there is an AED handy will save lives, they said, and they’re right.
However, most schools have already recognized that fact by investing in the machines. HB 1073 seeks to formalize what many school districts have already done without any concern for how they will accomplish the bill’s many requirements or how many additional AEDs each school will need.
Testimony about the specifics concerning how to implement the bill were suitably vague.
Heermann said that most of the $150,000 in the bill would likely make its way back to the general fund since there were so many entities offering grants for AEDs. Right.
Put yourself in the place of a harried school district business manager tasked with finding funding for AEDs to comply with the new law. Would you search the internet for likely funding partners or go right to the Department of Health where you know taxpayer money already resides for this purchase?
Asked to list the many sources of grants, Tony Burke, state government relations director for the American Heart Association, said they were available from Firehouse Subs and many others. Lawmakers let him off with that answer.
As for the cost of the machines, Burke said not to worry about that. The cost of AEDs ranges from $1,200 to $3,000, according to Burke, but bulk buying opportunities are available from suppliers. There were no questions from legislators about what the bulk price may be or if a school district that needed just two of the machines would qualify for a bulk price.
As for how many schools need more AEDs, Burke didn’t know that either. That would work itself out as school districts came to the heart association for help. There are just over 140 public school districts in the state, and who knows how many accredited nonpublic schools. If every one of them needed just one AED, Heermann’s $150,000 would be gone in a heartbeat.
During testimony on the bill, lawmakers heard how important it was, in the event of a heart attack, to have an AED close at hand. An amended version of the bill added the $150,000 appropriation and limited the scope of the bill, which originally called for AEDs at “each athletic venue where practices and competitions are held.” In the version endorsed by the committee, the availability of AEDs is limited to school grounds.
That change made the bill more amenable to school districts, but flies in the face of the heart association’s battle cry for a quick response. It’s a safe bet to say that there’s not a school district in the state that has a golf course on school grounds. The fastest growing high school sport in this state is girls’ softball. Of the 68 teams signed up for the sport, it’s likely that the vast majority of them play on city fields instead of on school grounds. There’s no provision in the bill for how to respond to a heart attack at those venues.
One proponent of the bill said that school districts “have the duty to be community lifesavers.” It seems that duty only extends to the edge of school grounds.
The committee passage of HB 1073 was a lesson in how not to mandate more of our school districts. Lawmakers on the committee were too accepting of vague answers to their questions while the proponents of the bill were lacking in their research.
The bill was forwarded on to the Joint Committee on Appropriations, the Legislature’s main budgeting panel. Let’s hope that those legislators are more forthright in their quest for answers before handing off $150,000 for a project that has good intentions but lacks the attention to detail that should be required for spending taxpayer dollars.
This commentary was written by Dana Hess of South Dakota Searchlight, an online news organization.
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