Chapel Hill, N.C. — Before Cardinal Gibbons lacrosse player Alex Beuris suffered his near-death injury, the N.C. High School Athletic Association was after funding that would put automated external defibrillators (AEDs) in all member schools.

The NCHSAA is calling the process the AED Placement Project, headed up by the NCHSAA director of development Karen DeHart.

According to DeHart, the project will place an AED in every school that doesn't already have one. She added that the current plan would not place additional AEDs in schools that already have one, but that it could be a future project.

"The goal is to make sure all member schools have at least one unit," DeHart told WRAL.

DeHart said the NCHSAA is projecting the project to be completed by December 2010, but acknowledged that it could happen sooner.

At the annual spring meeting last month, the NCHSAA Board of Directors approved $86,000 to go towards the project. The money will be given to the NCHSAA as a grant from the endowment fund which sits at $11.5 million.

Only half of the endowment fund is eligible for spending.

DeHart told WRAL that athletic directors across the state were surveyed a number of times to determine which schools did not have access to an AED.

"According to surveys we sent to athletic directors, there were only a handful who had them," DeHart said, "based on the fact that we have 151 who don’t have them, 150 plus our building, that leaves 228 with at least one unit."

The total cost for the project is estimated at $332,000, but DeHart said that will likely be lower because of a North Carolina statute that provides free first aid and CPR training for middle and high school teachers. Therefore, the majority of the cost will come from the purchasing of the units themselves and the wall mounts required for storage.

Reports from media outlets that the first 128 schools to apply for the grant would receive AEDs were incorrect.

The project will be broken up into four tiers, with the first tier going to the schools in most need of assistance for purchasing an AED. This information was determined by the NCHSAA by using, among other things, poverty data from the United States Census Bureau.

The first tier of AEDs is slated to be distributed next month. The second tier will begin in November, while the third and fourth tiers will happen in November 2009 and November 2010 respectively.

Other states, such as New York, have passed laws requiring at least one working AED on every school campus, as well as someone who is trained to use it. North Carolina does not have a law, although there are groups working to get a bill in the works.

All Wake County middle and high school have at least one AED on campus, and some schools have even more.

According to the Heart Rhythm Society, 7,000 school-aged children die from sudden cardiac arrest in the United States each year, and about one-half of all people that die from Sudden Cardiac Arrest have no prior symptoms of heart problems.

In addition, one in every 500 people have Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM), an extra thick heart muscle that often goes undetected in physicals and can become fatal in teenagers.

AEDs are particularly important for people who go into Sudden Cardiac Arrest because the chance of a victim surviving decreases by 10% for every minute without defibrillation. The average response time for ambulances in the United States is 8-12 minutes.