In January, Lutheran EMS kicked off its Project ADAM drills with the Warsaw Community School Corporation.
Lutheran EMS Director of Operations Alicia Mediano told the Warsaw-Wayne Fire Protection Territory Board Tuesday, “So what we are doing is we’ve partnered with Warsaw Community Schools and we started practicing these medical response teams in the schools to prepare them for calling 911 if a child would need emergency help, whether that would be medical or trauma, so that way the schools are prepared, their teachers are trained, their communities are aware of what’s going on. Their responders can get into the schools easier and have a nice, easy transition, and it really just provides a better community for our kids.”
While the program started in January, it’ll continue throughout the rest of the year. Mediano said they’ll do some planned drills so teachers will know what’s going, but some won’t be planned so teachers will be surprised and have to respond to a “sudden” medical emergency.
“It’s all about preparing the teachers, preparing the school and making a safer school for all of our kids in our community,” she said.
The drills will be conducted at every WCS elementary, middle and high school this year. Once they’ve gotten through every WCS school in 2025, the goal is to extend the program out to every other school system in 2026 and 2027, such as Triton, Tippecanoe Valley and Wawasee.
“Lots of drills coming up in all of the schools,” she said.
Councilman Mike Klondaris asked if ADAM was an acronym for something.
ADAM is an acronym for Automated Defibrillators in Adam’s Memory. The program honors the memory of Adam Lemel, a 17-year-old Whitefish Bay, Wis., high school student who suffered sudden cardiac arrest during a basketball game and collapsed on the court. A bystander administered CPR, but without a defibrillator (an AED), his heart couldn’t regain its normal rhythm, according to projectadam.com. The ambulance arrived within eight minutes, but Lemel needed an AED within two or three minutes to be given the best chance of survival.
“Now we are very fortunate with Warsaw Community Schools because the hospital, Lutheran Health Network, sponsors every teacher to be CPR certified at no cost to them. And with the support of the K21 (Health) Foundation, we have AEDs in our schools and we are already above that,” Mediano said. “So this program is really designed to make it so that way the kids are safer, they’ve got good health support, they’ve got good response teams.”
Klondaris asked about school resource officers (SRO) being trained.
Mediano said SROs are trained in CPR, but “it takes more than one person to respond to one of these emergencies, and they don’t practice this like they do everything else.”
The drills aren’t just sit-down conversations or lectures, she stated. “We’ve got all the equipment. It’s as live as live could be.”
Mediano also reported to the board that for January, “We ended the year with a total of 536 calls. When I compare that to 2024, we are up almost 12% of our call volume, and that just really reflects on the growth of the city and kind of what we’re feeling anyway in every other aspects. We expect that number to continue throughout 2025 to increase.”
She said they found in January they had more call volume in the later afternoon and evening than they normally do in January.
“We had normal times during the summer - we see that influx through the evening, but usually in the winter we don’t. And one of the things we were able to attribute that back to is the amount of respiratory illnesses that we took where we feel people were trying to muster through it throughout the entire day, and then realized they actually needed some help through the evening,” Mediano stated.
In other business:
• Fire Chief Joel Shilling reported WWFT had 320 responses in January. Of those, 100 incidents (31%) were overlapping. There were nine fire calls in January, five assists to and from other agencies and 227 rescue/EMS calls. They responded to 11 hazardous calls with no fire, eight service calls, 26 good intent calls and 13 false alarms/calls. There were 26 CARES calls in January.
By station, station 17 had 127 calls; station 13, 130; station 15, 37; and CARES, 26.
WWFT completed a total of 624.75 hours of training and dedicated 9.39 hours to community service.
• CARES Navigator Tanya Jackson reported in February they had 38 in-person calls and 20 significant phone calls. She said their most used population is 65 and older, and they’re doing a lot of elder care check-ins. They had 20 new consumers (people they’ve never met before) and 25 recurring consumers they continue to help and work with.
“I think our mental health navigation was our biggest request for help, outside the 65-plus, getting services for mental health,” she said.
• The board approved the one-year agreement with Flow-Tech Plumbing & Heating Inc. for routine maintenance for all heating and cooling equipment at all three of the fire stations, as requested by Shilling. The base cost for the one-year contract is $2,014.50.
The board also approved a list of travel requests.
• The next meeting is at 4 p.m. April 1 in the council chambers at City Hall.