Keeping a beat to save lives

Heads bobbed to the rapid beat of the Bee Gees’ song “Stayin’ Alive” on Wednesday at Nisqually Middle School as students pushed in tempo on training mannequins’ chests, practicing newly learned CPR techniques.

“He looks a little pale, but he might make it,” Karen Hoffman of Thurston County Medic One told a seventh-grader doing compressions.

Hoffman made her way around the classroom, making sure students kept tempo with the song, a tip that helped them maintain chest compressions at the suggested 100 beats per minute.

“Be sure to fully compress and fully recoil,” said Lacey Fire District 3 Lt. Alex Christiansen. “Remember that heart needs to fill with blood. One and two and three and four …”

Both instructors will end up teaching about 300 seventhgraders by the end of the week at Komachin , Nisqually and Chinook middle schools.

The idea came from a similar program in California, Christiansen said.

Thurston County’s emergency crews responded to more than 190 cardiac arrests in 2011. The county has a 47 percent cardiac arrest survival rate, well above the national average of less than 10 percent.

The only county west of the Mississippi River to beat Thurston County’s survival rate is King, at 49 percent, Hoffman said.

The goal is to raise that number to 85 percent with the help of residents doing compression CPR, Christiansen said.

The first step is offering the course to the seventh-graders . Christiansen said they plan to return to the middle schools quarterly for CPR training.

“We’ve discovered that seventh grade is the sweet spot where they are mature enough for the education aspect but aren’t ‘too cool for school,’ ” Christiansen said.

The class started with a couple of instructional videos.

One featured actor Ken Jeong , known for his appearance in “The Hangover.” He was dressed in a white suit similar to one worn by John Travolta in the film “Saturday Night Fever,” offering tips for CPR.

After the videos, the students were split into groups and went straight to compressions. The American Heart Association no longer recommends doing mouthto-mouth breathing during CPR.

“People were reluctant to do mouth-to-mouth and wouldn’t do CPR,” Christiansen told the class. “They were afraid of catching something from a stranger.”

The compressions alone push on the heart and lungs, providing some air flow, Christiansen said. Arianie Cortez, 12, had taken a CPR class when she was 9 for her baby-sitting credentials, and it’s a skill she already has put to the test.

“I had to do CPR a couple of Christmases ago when my uncle had a heart attack,” Arianie said. “He is alive now because of it.”

Arianie said she was impressed by how well her classmates did .

“Most kids are scared of this stuff, and the music helped a lot,” Arianie said. They weren’t as freaked out as I thought they would be.”

Christiansen and Hoffman wanted each student to come away with a fundamental, threepronged lesson: shake and shout, call 911 , perform CPR.

The groups of about four students each would shake their mannequins, asking if they were OK. After no response, one student would point to another, telling them to call 911 .

Using their pinky fingers and thumbs to mimic a telephone, they would pretend to call dispatchers while a third student began working on chest compressions.

After two minutes, the students would switch out on compressions.

Once they completed the class, students were presented with CPR cards.

“Do not be afraid to be the ones to take charge,” Hoffman told the group. “We are really relying on you guys to be our partners and our teammates in this.”

Chelsea Krotzer: 360-754-5476 ckrotzer@theolympian.com   theolympian.com/thisjustin   @chelseakrotzer