Teachers learn new skill: how to stop the bleeding

Associated Press

PLEASANT HILL, IOWA

As she learned the basics of applying direct pressure, packing a wound with gauze and tying a tourniquet, sixth-grade math and social studies teacher Kari Stafford shook her head at the thought that this may now be an essential skill for her profession.

Stafford didn’t like it, but with school shootings now a regular occurrence, she and her colleagues have reluctantly accepted that the attacks won’t stop and that teachers must know how to keep the victims from bleeding to death.

“Learning to help and not just stand there is important,” said Stafford, who joined about a dozen other educators at a medical training session at Southeast Polk High School, a sprawling 9-year-old campus surrounded by farmland in Pleasant Hill, just east of Des Moines.

Over the past five years, about 125,000 teachers, counselors and administrators across the country have been trained in stemming blood loss as school officials have become resigned to the grim trend. The effort is rapidly expanding, and more schools are stocking classrooms with supplies that would be familiar to any military medic: lightweight tourniquets, gauze coated with blood-clotting drugs and compression bandages.

Although schools are adding security and even arming teachers to deter attacks, new emphasis is being given to saving the wounded while counting down the minutes until help arrives.

The teacher triage idea was initially pushed by Dr. Lenworth Jacobs of Hartford, Conn., who operated on victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, in which 26 children and adults were killed.

He feared that Sandy Hook wouldn’t be the last school shooting, and his assumption has been borne out again and again.

“I’ve been a trauma surgeon for over 40 years and have seen a lot of gunshot wounds,” he said, but an elementary school massacre is “entirely different. These are 6-year-olds with wounds from very high-powered weaponry, and it changes you.”

Jacobs and other like-minded surgeons formed a group that expanded to include law enforcement and other first-responders who developed strategies for helping victims survive.

The initiative, dubbed Stop the Bleed, has spread quickly and training is available in all 50 states.