Charlotte Dilgard-Clark, a junior in Glen Cove High School’s Media Communications program, earned first place in the Public Service Announcement category at the Locust Valley High School Film Festival in March. Her project was “Know Where the AED Is,” a film inspired by her mother’s cardiac arrest during a Board of Education meeting on June 5, 2024.
That day, Caroline Dilgard-Clark, 48, had approached the podium in the high school auditorium to speak about Regents exam grading policies when she began to feel something was off. “I felt as I was walking up my heart racing,” she recalled. An experienced public speaker, she initially brushed it off as nerves.
Within moments, that assumption proved dangerously wrong. “By the time I had reached the podium, I was in full-on cardiac arrest without realizing it,” Dilgard-Clark recounted. She remembers attempting to speak, apologizing for feeling lightheaded — and then nothing.
“She looked over at me, and she said that she wasn’t feeling good,” District Clerk Ida Johnson recalled. As Dilgard-Clark collapsed, Johnson rushed over, caught her and eased her to the floor. At first it seemed as if she might be having a seizure, but the situation escalated quickly. “From there her lips turned blue,” Johnson said. “At that point I screamed for an AED machine.”
A small group sprang into action. Johnson, who had been trained as an emergency medical technician decades earlier, joined school board President Angela Raimo and Deasy Elementary School Principal Erin Nastri in performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation on Dilgard-Clark, who was unconscious and had no pulse, following the robotic-voice instructions of an automated external defibrillator.
“Although we were doing CPR and everything, I was the breather,” Johnson said, describing how she used a barrier device from the AED kit while others did chest compressions. “From the time she went down until the time that she was shocked, we definitely lost her,” she added. “I kept looking in her eyes, and I knew that she was no longer with us.”
A student at the high school, Harrison Velentzas, had retrieved the AED, and Johnson recalled his composure. “He was so calm when he brought that device down,” she said. Eventually the AED called for a shock to be delivered — and that changed everything. “That AED machine definitely brought her back home where she belonged,” Johnson said.
Dilgard-Clark had no detectable pulse for approximately six minutes before being revived, a time when immediate intervention is often the difference between life and death.
After she regained consciousness, she was taken to Glen Cove Hospital, and was later diagnosed with long QT syndrome, a genetic condition that disrupts the heart’s electrical rhythm. She has since undergone surgery to implant a defibrillator, and now takes daily medication to prevent a recurrence. Despite the severity of the episode, she had no prior indication that she was a likely candidate for cardiac arrest.
For her daughter, Charlotte, the incident was both distant and deeply personal. Then a sophomore at the high school, she was asleep at home when it happened, and she only learned about it the next morning.
“I was just really confused,” Charlotte said. “She was just home a couple hours ago.” The experience lingered, eventually shaping the direction of her classwork, and she decided to focus on AED awareness for her media communications PSA project.
“We knew that somehow we wanted to talk about either AEDs or CPR,” Charlotte said. Over the course of several months, she developed the film, carefully weighing how much of her family’s experience to include.
Her media communications teacher, Christopher Barry, said the project stood out for its authenticity. “No one’s ever submitted anything to me that affected their life like that,” Barry said. After discussions with Charlotte and her mother, the decision was made to include the video footage from the meeting capturing the moment Caroline collapsed. “That’s the shot that would drive it home,” Barry said.
The final product weaved together national statistics on cardiac arrest survival rates, a heartbeat audio track that builds and then falls silent, and imagery of AEDs and the auditorium where the incident unfolded, using personal storytelling to create a clear and urgent message about preparedness. “When you’re in public, look around and know where the AEDs are,” Charlotte says in her voice-over.
After the incident, the Glen Cove school district reviewed its emergency response procedures. Superintendent Alexa Doeschner said the district expanded its efforts beyond existing requirements, including evaluating AED placement, strengthening cardiac response plans and increasing staff training in line with state guidelines.
“That night was a frightening one for our community,” Doeschner said. “Their actions saved Mrs. Dilgard-Clark’s life.”
For Caroline, the outcome still feels extraordinary. “Out of all the places for this to happen, this was the safest place,” she said. “It is nothing short of a miracle.”
