Jim Cobb and Kristen Cobb Simpson are part of a group pushing for a bill in Florida requiring high school students to learn CPR before graduating. They’re from Louisiana where they say the measure is already part of state law.
“It’s a law in Louisiana that’s named after my late son Burke Cobb who died at his high school of a sudden cardiac arrest after playing basketball with a group of his friends," Cobb says. There were actually two adults there also. Burke was shooting basketball with his friends and suffered a sudden cardiac arrest and there was 24, 25 people there with him and no one knew how to recognize what was going on with him.”
Cobb says one of the people with Burke was a coach who had been trained in first aid and CPR. But despite that training, the coach didn’t react in time. He says if all the students there had be taught CPR it would have significantly increased the number of people who could react.
“Burke was playing basketball and there were 24, 25 kids there. Now the coach was there. If there’s an adult present and he freezes or you know loses thought of what to do, has a weird reaction, among those 24, 25 kids, you have 24,25 potential life savers there,” Cobb says.
And Cobb Simpson, Burke’s aunt who became a CPR trainer after her nephew’s death, says in her experience children are often more likely to react.
“If kids have the knowledge, you empower them to be able to take action in an emergency, I think they’re almost more inclined to take action than adults. They don’t think about a lot of the things that adults think about before they act. They’re more likely to jump into action and do something and use the training that they’ve learned,” Cobb Simpson says.
Cape Canaveral Republican Sen. Thad Altman (R-Cape Canaveral) is sponsoring a bill that would require students to take an hour of CPR training before graduating. He says it's a basic life skill.
And there are cases, horrific cases, where someone has had a heart attack and people were around, but they just didn’t know what to do. This at least gives students the ability to understand how to you administer simple CPR,” Altman says.
Altman calls the cost to get training equipment "very small." And he says students are learning more than just a skill when they learn CPR, so he says he doesn’t see that the added requirement would mean taking away from time to teach other subjects.
“You do learn about the human basic cardiovascular system. You understand a lot about human biology,” Altman says.
And Jim Cobb says as a dad with kids still going through the public school system he agrees. He says schools could fit the lesson into P.E. classes when it’s too rainy for students to go outside. Two similar bills are up for consideration in the house. One would also require schools to give lessons on using a defibrillator.
