Heading to Harrisburg: Aidan's Law!

This MEMORANDUM (see below) went out to ALL SENATE MEMBERS yesterday afternoon!!!  So exciting!!!

Please pass along word and ask your PA friends and family to call their senators BY FRIDAY to urge them to support or sponsor the bill!!!

Also, PLEASE SIGN OUR PETITION.  It takes just a second.  Names en masse really make a difference!!!

Sign our petition and find your senator by clicking this link:
PA Residents: Call PA Senators to co-sponsor "Aidan's Law" keeping AED's in our schools

Aidan's Law calls for mandating at least one AED per school building in the public schools across the state of Pennsylvania.

Memorandum

Posted:	February 12, 2013 04:33 PM
To:	All Senate Members
From:	Senator Andrew Dinniman and Senator John Rafferty
Subject:	A bill to keep Automated External Defibrillators (AED’s) in our schools

We will soon introduce a bill to help reduce the number of young lives lost to sudden cardiac arrest, which is very conservatively estimated at 2,000 a year in the United States by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Our bill will require each public school instructional building to keep and maintain an automated external defibrillator (AED), the portable medical device designed to analyze the heart rhythm and deliver an electric shock to victims of ventricular fibrillation to restore the hearth rhythm to normal.

We are calling our bill Aidan’s Law in honor of Aidan Silva, a seven-year-old Chester County resident who succumbed to sudden cardiac arrest on September 4, 2010. Aidan had no symptoms of a heart condition prior to his death.

Some of our public schools already have AED’s due to Act 4 of 2001, a one-time AED program that placed nearly 2,000 AED’s in public and private schools. Warranties on machines from this time period ended approximately seven years ago and manufacturers recently announced they will stop making replacement parts for these machines in 2014. Our bill would ensure such dated machines are replaced and that all our public schools have AED’s that are fully charged and property maintained.

Similar to Act 4 of 2001, our bill would have the Department of General Services seek bids to purchase the number of AED’s needed to ensure one for every public instructional school building in Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Department of Education would then assist public school entities in acquiring AED’s at a subsidized price.

To help the schools with the purchase of AED’s, our bill is again modeled after Act 4 of 2001 and would appropriate funding from the Tobacco Settlement Fund. Whereas Act 4 of 2001 appropriated $2.5 million to help with the purchases, our bill would appropriate $3 million.