By Skye Crawford
Hailey Yentz was lifting weights with her track and field team in February 2025, when she started to feel dizzy. Without knowing why, she collapsed in a teammate’s arms and for 10 minutes, she had no pulse.
The college senior was having a heart attack.
After that cardiac arrest, Yentz, who had been a student athlete at East Carolina University, was diagnosed with a rare genetic heart condition called arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy, or ARVC. Doctors implanted a pacemaker and defibrillator that keeps her heart from stopping again.
Yentz attributes her survival that day last year to the athletic trainers who knew what to do. Recently, she came to the North Carolina legislature to advocate for the Smart Heart Act, a bill that would require all public schools in North Carolina to prepare and train relevant personnel to save lives like Yentz’s and have cardiac emergency response plans (CERPs) and automated external defibrillators (AEDs).
Painful lessons
Emma Kate Burns, government relations director for the American Heart Association in North Carolina, said 99 percent of schools in the state have at least one AED, with 80 percent having more than one. However, five counties have at least one school that does not have an AED — Wake, Martin, Haywood, Hertford and Gaston counties.
In early 2022, a middle school student in the Roanoke Rapids Graded School District died from a sudden cardiac emergency during recess. In response, the system worked to become the first Heart-Safe District in North Carolina; they earned the designation before that year’s end.
Sara Council, director of student services for the district, said the staff who were there that day responded immediately and took all proper steps.
“They did everything, but we still lost that child,” Council said. “That loss changed us as a district.”
Council said they started to think about other schools in the district and how prepared they would be to handle a cardiac emergency. Now, Council said they have enough AEDs on campuses to get one to an individual within three minutes. They partner with the local fire department and community college to train staff ahead of the school year to ensure preparedness.
“Our district learned something that I hope no school or district ever has to learn the hard way. No district should have to lose a child and wish they had been more prepared,” Council said. “Legislation is necessary right now.”
Another supporter of the Smart Heart Act is Denny Kellington, vice president of player health and performance for the Carolina Panthers. In 2023, Kellington helped revive Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin when he experienced cardiac arrest on the field in Cincinnati during a nationwide Monday Night Football telecast.
“I believe the last 27 years of practicing CPR, being prepared and reviewing our emergency action plans helped us that night in Cincinnati,” Kellington said. “That preparation allowed us to act quickly and efficiently when cardiac arrest occurred on the field. Following our plan allowed us to be successful.”
AED access increases survival chances
The American Heart Association found that people in cardiac arrest who are shocked by an AED within the first minute have a 90 percent survival rate. Additionally, more than 15 percent of cardiac arrests that happen outside a hospital happen in a public place, and bystanders administer CPR 40 percent of the time.
“What most of us aren’t usually thinking about when we walk into a building is that the people around us and the equipment in that building determine whether we live or die,” Yentz said.
Ten-year-old Adeline Dinin was born with a heart condition and had open heart surgery when she was seven days old.
“I know I’m only 10 years old, but I spend a lot of my life trying to get people thinking about AEDs, like how to use them and why they matter,” Adeline said. “A lot of people have never even heard of one, and that means that sometimes when someone needs one, the people around them don’t know what to do.”
Adeline’s father also has her condition, but the family didn’t know that until after she was diagnosed.
“My mom, my family, likes to say I was his guardian angel,” Adeline said. “Some kids, like me, know they have a heart condition, but some kids, and even adults like my dad, might not know it yet.”
Adeline said kids with “perfectly healthy hearts” can have a cardiac emergency, and she wants every school in North Carolina to have an AED so others share her chances of survival.
Survivors and advocates recognize that AEDs in schools benefit more than just students.
“When you think about who comes through the doors of a school every day, it’s not just the students. It’s staff, visitors and family members from across the community,” Council said. “A cardiac emergency can happen to any of them at any moment.”
The Smart Heart Act builds on cardiac safety legislation from the past two decades, seeking to prepare for this unpredictability.
Close to home
After surviving a cardiac emergency in 2009 thanks to a nearby AED, Rep. Becky Carney (D-Charlotte) sponsored legislation that requires CPR certification for students to graduate high school in North Carolina. It passed in July 2012 and first took effect for the 2015 graduating class.
“I can’t tell you how many people responded to me — students who took the CPR training,” Carney said. “I got a call saying ‘Thank you for what you did. I saved my grandaddy’s life.’”
From there, she said she saw communities collaborate to make their spaces more safe through AED access and CPR training. Since then Carney has supported further legislation that advocated for AEDs in public spaces like government buildings and parks and recreation facilities.
“We recognized those issues that needed to be addressed way before it ever was encountered in this way,” Carney said.
Sen. Kevin Corbin (R-Franklin) is a primary sponsor of the Smart Heart Act and said he proposed the legislation last year when the American Heart Association reached out to him, but the lack of a state budget meant it didn’t pass. Now, they are aiming to roll the language from this bill into the budget.
“That was one of the concerns of the local school systems, was if we passed this and said ‘You have to do it,’ but there wasn’t money with it,” Corbin said. “It was gonna be basically an unfunded mandate.”
The state budget has not yet been presented to the public, much less voted on, but Corbin said he asked for $4 million to fund training and place AEDs in schools statewide.
Rep. Wyatt Gable (R-Jacksonville), another primary sponsor of the bill, said his office has reached out to the federal government to request rural health grants for places like Martin County.
“That’d be the focus, would be the rural stuff because I know that’s what this administration is really focused on,” Gable said. “But for all of them, we’ve reached out to see if there’s any federal money.”
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