On November 13th, 2019 Saugus High School choir teacher Katie Holt probably never thought she would use the bleeding control training she was provided or the bleeding control kit in her California classroom. The next day, Holt used both. As a result, she is the only reason one of her students is alive today.
We don’t want to think, much less talk, about the threat of violence in our schools, but lockdown d1ills are commonplace, and staff are going through much more emergency response training than they ever did.
Hardening of infrastructure is where most of the attention on school security is directed today. While it is vitally important to keep out bad people, just as much focus needs to address the question: What if we can’t? So many gun-related incidents in schools are being carried out by students themselves, which means we need to focus on preparedness from the inside-out, not just the outside-in.
At citizenAID, we developed a training program and bleeding control first aid kits so staff have the skills and equipment to act in the seconds and minutes after someone is seriously wounded to save his or her life, just as Katie Holt did.
Currently, citizenAID is in more than 7,500 classrooms across the country and we have trained nearly 15,000 teachers for free. Last summer; Park National Bank Corp. joined our mission to give back to teachers by training nearly 1,000 of the company’s retail employees via our online training. This resulted in a multiplier effect: citizenAID has now matched the bank’s investment by providing 1,000 trainings in local school districts at no additional cost. The bank and their community partners then donated and placed citizenAID bleeding control equipment in 20 school districts in central Ohio.
Read the full Article in School Administrator 