Parents, lawmakers working to improve schools’ handling of medical emergencies
Landon Payton’s name echoed across the Texas Senate floor as Houston-area Sen. Carol Alvarado pitched a school safety bill to lawmakers earlier this month.
The emerald-carpeted Senate chamber is 166 miles from the Marshall Middle School gymnasium in Houston ISD, where 14-year-old Landon suffered a medical emergency on Aug. 14. He died at a nearby hospital soon after.
Landon’s family has spent the last nine months looking for answers, including his official cause of death, as they prepare to file a potential lawsuit against the district. His legacy could influence up to 10 bills Houston-area parents and state lawmakers have filed to improve emergency response policies at Texas schools, from requiring more automated external defibrillators on-campus to introducing more comprehensive CPR training.
“His tragic passing highlighted a critical gap in safety measures across Texas schools,” Alvarado said in an April committee meeting.
Ruqayya Gibson thought she knew which warning signs to look out for before medical emergencies. A former Cy-Fair ISD track and field coach and current sprinting and hurdles coach at the University of Alabama, she knew that sudden cardiac arrest could happen to anyone — even seemingly healthy high school track-and-field athletes like her son, Damani Gibson.
Still, she felt unprepared when Damani died suddenly after track practice in 2019.
“He sounded fine, and then the next thing I know, my world shifted,” Gibson said. “This became a new part of my world, to help raise awareness and help other families understand that this can happen in the blink of an eye.”
Every year, there are more than 356,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests in the U.S., and nearly 90% of them are fatal. Around 2,000 people under 25 die from SCA each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
After Damani’s death, Gibson created the Damani Gibson Foundation, which offers free heart screenings, CPR and AED classes and provides support to families who have lost loved ones to cardiac arrest. This year, she’s also worked with Houston-area lawmakers on bills that would educate school staff and students on sudden cardiac arrest.
AED functionality
Texas schools are currently required to have at least one AED per campus. Houston ISD had an average of three working AEDs per campus at the time of Landon’s death, HISD said in August. But 1 in 6 AEDs were flagged for expired or broken parts in annual inspections conducted in the months before his death, according to a Chronicle analysis.
It’s unclear whether an AED could have saved Landon’s life. But a local teachers union and the Paytons’ lawyer, Chris Tritico, have alleged that the school gym’s AED was not working at the time of the incident. The gym’s device had expired electrode pads when it was inspected in May, three months before Landon’s death, according to records obtained by the Chronicle.
A group of HISD parent physicians helped pick up Gibson’s torch after Landon’s death, speaking out about AED reform in school board meetings while working with lawmakers including Sen. Molly Cook.
“(We) just stood up and said, as an HISD parent and physician, this is completely unacceptable,” parent and physician Lisa Weiss said.
An external contractor inspected every AED annually, while on-campus nurses were tasked with monthly inspections, former HISD nurse Michelle Miller said. Ordering replacement parts was sporadic, however, Miller said, and often took several weeks to be fulfilled. The district’s nursing staff has also been cut in half since the 2023-24 school year.
If the campus nurse was unavailable or there was no campus nurse, another staff member was is supposed to be designated to handle and maintain AED inspections, Miller said.
Authored by Alvarado, SB 1177 would require every campus AED to be inspected during fire safety inspections.
After Landon’s death, the district ordered replacement parts for every expired AED and vowed to have at least two working AEDs per campus. The district will fund at least two functional AEDs, Stop the Bleed kits, and CPR certification for at least three staff members per campus for the 2025-26 school year, according to a March budget workshop.
A bill authored by Houston-area Rep. Suleman Lalani would put those changes into writing. The bill would require schools to have enough AEDs so that a person could use the devices anywhere on campus within three minutes of a medical emergency.
Another, authored by Cook, would require campus AEDs to be located in clearly marked and unlocked locations.
“We need to constantly engage with and learn from our past to improve our future,” Lalani said. “Every minute is important. In fact, every second is important. That’s what the idea behind this was, is that one life lost is one too many.”
‘You … can save a life’While the district introduced uniform AEDs after Landon’s death, there were still not enough staff members who were trained in CPR and AED use, Miller said.
“Even with this implementation, it does not address the problem of ensuring staff members know how to use the AED machine correctly and ensuring staff members know where the AED machines (are located),” Miller said.
A bill authored by Greenville-area Sen. Angela Paxton that is nearly identical to Lalani’s would require each school to have an emergency response plan for cardiac arrest. Another bill authored by Alvarado — which hosts a companion bill in the Texas House from Texas Rep. Christina Morales, who advocated for the Payton family after Landon’s death — would require require more staff members, such as PE instructors, athletic coaches and other employees designated by the Texas Education Agency commissioner to receive CPR training and maintain a CPR certification.
“I just think it’s important for the public to know, for every layperson out there to have the tools that they need to be the heart and lungs that somebody needs until emergency services arrives,” said Cook, who is also an emergency room nurse. “You really can save a life.”
Until his autopsy report is released, Landon’s family remains without answers.
For a medical examiner’s office to be accredited by the National Association of Medical Examiners, 90% of the autopsies it performs must be completed within 90 days of the examination. But some cases, especially those involving a child’s sudden death, may require extensive medical record reviews, cardiac consultations, toxicology studies or genetic testing that is conducted outside of the medical examiner’s office, association president Reade Quinton told the Chronicle.
“Some cases require exhaustive investigation beyond the performance of the actual autopsy before the medical examiner is comfortable rendering an opinion to the cause and manner of death,” Quinton said. “In the end, it is better for a case to be delayed if it means the most accurate determination of the cause of death.”
Landon’s cause of death is still pending because the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences is awaiting additional testing from an external laboratory, spokesperson Shane Hughes told the Chronicle.
Legislative slownessThe legislation is similarly on hold.
Most of the nine bills related to automated external defibrillators have not passed through either chamber, although SB 1177 passed unanimously through the Senate on April 16. Strained funding remains a concern for public schools as they fine-tune their budgets for the next school year, although Paxton’s bill would require a grant program to help create a cardiac emergency response plan, with an emphasis on schools with more economically disadvantaged students.
Regardless of what is written into law, Gibson said more awareness and training is needed to prevent the deaths of more students and staff.
“Why are we as families and as a community not paying attention to this and demanding that there’s a better standard of care for our kids?” Gibson said. “People shouldn’t wait until they’ve lost a child or lost an athlete to want to pay attention to it, because now that life could have been saved.”
