A new skill is being required for Arizona high school seniors to become eligible to graduate. Beginning in July 2019, every school must offer a CPR course and all seniors must pass the course. Earlier this school year, seniors had an opportunity to get certified at school for free. On February 11th  they had another day for those who missed the first session, held by Assistant Principal Lundstrom. This session was for adult only CPR. The first thing the class went over was the beginning  steps you would need to do before you perform CPR. In all honesty, when I found out this year that we needed CPR in order to graduate, I thought that was pretty cool. It may not seem useful right now, but in the future you never know when you might need it.

The beginning of the class started with Lundstrom speaking on his experience with CPR and how he needed to use it years back on a girl at the local pool and saved her life. We watched a video about the first basic few steps that you need to take in order to perform CPR on someone. After that we started to perform CPR on the test dummies. We also learned how to use the AED and where we can locate one around our campus. Here are the steps you need to take to perform CPR:

1. You need to look around and make sure the scene is safe.
2. Try seeing if the person is responsive.
3. Check their pulse (if no pulse tell someone to call 911)
4. Start performing compressions (every 30 compression give 2 breaths and compress down 2 inches)
5. And if need be, use an AED.
6. Continue doing this until emergency response teams come.

The last thing we did was take a short quiz about what we learned and that was the end of the session. “I’m glad to have this new knowledge that may help me save a life one day,” said senior Gabriella Jamerson. “I think that the CPR class was very beneficial even though it may not seem like it right now,” said another senior Celeste Marquez.