Denmark Technical College Receives Grant to Expand AED Access Campus-Wide

Denmark Technical College, the public HBCU anchoring the rural Bamberg County community along Solomon Blatt Boulevard, secured an SCC3 grant to expand access to automated external defibrillators across its campus, college officials announced this month under the leadership of newly installed president Dr. Eric Brown.

The grant puts life-saving hardware within reach of students, faculty, and the broader community the college serves: a three-county footprint that takes in Bamberg, Barnwell, and Allendale. The core urgency behind any AED expansion is a blunt number that rarely appears in grant announcements: survival odds from sudden cardiac arrest drop 7 to 10 percent for every minute that passes without defibrillation. Shock a victim within the first minute and the chance of survival approaches 90 percent. Wait for EMS, whose national average response time exceeds eight minutes, and those odds can collapse before a squad car or ambulance reaches a rural campus.

Denmark Tech, a two-year technical college with an enrollment that skews heavily toward first-generation students from low-income households, has historically served populations with limited access to the kind of robust emergency infrastructure found in larger urban institutions. A campus-wide AED network closes that gap in a meaningful way, putting the first line of cardiac response in the hands of anyone on the grounds when an emergency strikes rather than leaving it entirely to Bamberg County EMS.

Dr. Brown, who began his tenure at the college in October 2025 and was formally invested as its 10th president on January 30, 2026, has framed his leadership around student success and institutional strengthening. The SCC3 grant represents a concrete extension of that mandate into campus safety, a domain that affects not just enrolled students but the faculty, staff, and community members who regularly use Denmark Tech's facilities for events and public programs.

No installation timeline or site-specific placement schedule has been publicly confirmed by the college as of this reporting.