Teachers, guidance counselors and school nurses in Swansea are being trained on how to prevent a student or colleague from bleeding out in the event of a school shooting.
SWANSEA - Teachers, guidance counselors and school nurses in Swansea are being trained on how to prevent a student or colleague from bleeding out in the event of a school shooting.
“It’s sad that we have to train people do this, but unfortunately it’s become a reality,” said Leslie Stolts, a registered nurse who is director of health services for the Swansea Public Schools.
On Monday morning, about 40 faculty and staff members at Joseph Case Junior High School learned how to apply a tourniquet. Two U.S. Army Reserve combat medics instructed them how to apply pressure to a wound, pack it with gauze and apply the tourniquet.
“This is just part of reality now. It’s a part of life,” said Nicole Nowosielski, a paraprofessional who went through the training while being 39 weeks pregnant.
“And I did it successfully,” she said. “It’s not difficult at all. And you never know when you’re going to need it.”
Like other districts across the country in recent weeks, Swansea school officials have been assessing their security protocols and bolstering safety measures since a gunman on Feb. 14 killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
Most of the attention has been focused on preventing school shootings, but districts are also looking at how to respond if and when a shooting happens.
“In a lot of these situations, people feel like there’s nothing I can do, I either lock my door, jump out a window or I throw myself in front of a bullet,” said Erin Silvia, a registered nurse who is the school nurse at Case Junior High School.
The “Stop the Bleed” program that the Case Junior High School staff underwent on Monday deals with the reality that students and adults will suffer life-threatening gunshot wounds during a school shooting, and that medical aid might not be readily available until police SWAT teams neutralize the gunman and secure the building.
“God willing, we don’t ever have a shooting, but if we do, our staff knows how to help those people while they’re waiting for EMS,” Silvia said.
The “Stop the Bleed” initiative in Massachusetts has grown from the work of Dr. David King, a trauma surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston who has been out front in getting teachers and the general public trained on how to apply tourniquets during a mass casualty event.
King, a U.S. Army surgeon who treated hundreds of wounded soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, ran the 2013 Boston Marathon, and then for 30 hours operated on dozens of victims who were wounded when two bombs were detonated near the finish line.
U.S. Army Reserve Col. Richard Bailey, the commander of the 804th Medical Brigade in Massachusetts, said he reached out to King after watching a report on his tourniquet program, and has done joint tourniquet training sessions with him across the state.
Bailey, who was one of the instructors Monday at Case Junior High School, said he has helped train 1,300 civilian and public sector workers in Massachusetts.
“Our ultimate goal is to get this as a program across the U.S. Army Reserve,” said Bailey, who noted that none of the makeshift tourniquets that were applied to the marathon bombing victims in 2013 were effective.
The purpose-made orange tourniquets that Bailey demonstrated to teachers cost about $26, and come in kits that include gauze, scissors and pens to write down the time for when the tourniquet is applied. The tourniquet kits will be available with the automated external defibrillators that each school in Swansea will be receiving this summer.
“Our goal is to have tourniquets as ubiquitous as AEDs,” Silvia said.
Eventually, every teacher, principal, school nurse and guidance counselor in Swansea will be trained on tourniquets, as they are with CPR and the Heimlich maneuver. Silvia said the need for that kind of training is “tragic,” but necessary in today’s world.
“We feel like we can make a difference with this,” Silvia said.
Email Brian Fraga at bfraga@heraldnews.com