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PHOENIX – A months-long effort aimed at improving the safety of Phoenix High School students and staff culminated with a banner-unveiling in the PHS commons today as over a dozen Phoenix-Talent School District employees, emergency responders and three nursing students celebrated Phoenix High’s designation as Oregon’s first Project ADAM Heart Safe School.

To earn Project ADAM Heart Safe status schools must implement a sudden cardiac arrest program of awareness, training and effective emergency response as outlined in an exhaustive checklist. Heart Safe schools also must equip their buildings with Automated External Defibrillators and make sure they’re clearly marked. PHS now has four AEDs strategically placed around campus. 

Phoenix High’s Project ADAM effort began during the 2024-25 school year as the brainchild of PTS district nurse Carrie McDonald, who brought on three Oregon Health & Science University nursing students – Clara Fain, Sydney Gray and Katelyn Neklason – to help get the program off the ground. All three were there to pose with the banner today along with a large contingent of staffers who went through the training and executed a mock code drill – another requirement – last June. The banner, which will hang in PHS, was made by the mother of a teenager who died after suffering a cardiac event. 

“It feels really good,” Neklason said following today's celebration. “It feels like you’re actually making a change, not only in this community but potentially in other schools. And being the only school in Oregon is really cool to be a part of.”

Gray agreed. 

“What (McDonald) says is this is our way of caring about the community and making them a little bit safer. And so it’s kind of like we did our part to make a little bit of change and that’s pretty cool.”

The students identified four primary goals as they took on the project: 

• Become the first school in Oregon to achieve Project ADAM certification.
• Educate staff and community members about the importance of preparedness for sudden cardiac arrest (SCA).
• Raise awareness of SCA and how early AED intervention can dramatically increase survival rates.
• Build a heart-safe community in the Phoenix-Talent School District by reducing the risk of death from cardiac emergencies and improving survival through early action.

PHS health careers teacher Carolina Campbell, who helped run the mock code drill held June 11 at PHS and is one of several staff members on the school’s Community Emergency Response Team (CERT), said the school is ready should a cardiac emergency arise on campus.

“We have people spread all throughout the building who have very specific roles,” she said, “and should cardiac arrest happen we’re a radio call away and everybody springs into action and knows their roles, knows how to respond, knows how to perform CPR. We get emergency response here ASAP – we know how to do the handoff with them. …Every AED that’s here is very strategically placed so that it can be reached within a certain time because we know that even though paramedics and the fire department arrive as quickly as they can, oftentimes it’s not soon enough.”

Project ADAM was founded by Patty and Joe Lemel, whose son Adam Lemel collapsed and died while playing basketball at age 17. Adam suffered a Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA) in which ventricular fibrillation occurred, a condition in which the ventricles cannot pump blood into the body. An AED could have saved his life.

Campbell said she’s ecstatic that Phoenix High is now equipped to deal with an SCA within minutes.

“I am so excited,” she said. “I was talking to (McDonald) earlier and I got goosebumps and I kind of got them again. I just think it’s so awesome. I for a while said that I felt uncomfortable being one of the few people on campus who knew how to respond to an emergency – there weren’t enough of us. So this brought a really great opportunity for a lot of our staff to know how to respond if something were to happen and I just think it’s a beautiful thing for our community.”