Teachers acquire a new skill: how to stop the bleeding
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, counsellors 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 now stocking classrooms with supplies that would be familiar to any military medic: lightweight tourniquets, gauze coated with blood-clotting drugs and compression bandages.