A Pleasant Valley student attended the board meeting Thursday night to recognize some people who came to his rescue last spring.

Mason Ostrich, a sophomore at the high school, was at the middle school on March 10 for play practice when he had a seizure, became unresponsive and wasn’t breathing.

Fortunately, Deryck Snyder, an athletic trainer with St. Luke’s University Health Network, and Michael Ditty Jr., a volunteer softball coach, were at the school that day and jumped in to help him. They performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation on Mason until paramedics arrived and took him to the hospital.

A few weeks after the event, Superintendent James Konrad read a proclamation in their honor at a school board meeting,

“Derek Snyder and Michael Ditty selflessly made a split-second decision of a life and death nature to perform a purposeful, distinctive and successful lifesaving act on another human,” he said.

“Thank you for this opportunity to express my gratitude in person,” Mason Ostrich said on Thursday. “As many of you know, March 10, 2022, was a day that could have ended very differently for me. … Anyone that knows me making light of my personal trauma is pretty much how I roll. But please don’t think that it lessens my feelings of gratitude for all the love and support I received from my PV family. Thanks to you, Mr. Ditty and Mr. Snyder, I will continue to bust chops and make people laugh.”

Ostrich also thanked his dad, Matthew Ostrich, for his support.

Matthew Ostrich also offered words of thanks to everyone for their help, and Snyder and Ditty especially.

“To both of you, as hard as I may try, I would never adequately express the amount of gratitude I have for you and how important the actions you guys took to save my boy. You guys are the definition of the word heroes.”

“What an uplifting story,” said school board President Sue Kresge. “Thank you for sharing.”