Training For Teachers

If a student gets hurt, what's past the band-aid? What do you do then?

Prepared to Care in a School Emergency: Evidence-based care training designed for educators and school staff.

Teachers and school staff care deeply about the safety and well-being of their students. While schools strive to prevent emergencies, preparation includes knowing how to respond effectively if serious injuries occur. This training helps educators understand what to do in the critical minutes before professional help arrives.

Why This Training Matters in Schools

Medical emergencies in schools can arise from many causes, including accidents, sudden illness, or acts of violence.

In these situations, teachers and staff are often the first adults present and able to help. This training focuses on practical, evidence-based skills and decision-making that can be applied without a medical background.

"I realized how unprepared we were for an emergency. It will not happen to my team again."

-School Superintendent after a major emergency hit one of his schools

In 2016, two students and one teacher were wounded after a teenager fired rounds into a schoolyard. 6-year old Jacob Hall died. The first-grader lost 75 percent of his blood from a bullet, which pierced his femoral artery in his thigh, officials said. He was rushed to Greenville Health System Children’s Hospital, where he had multiple surgeries after going into cardiac arrest. At that time, the school nurse was not trained in the use of tourniquets or controlling life-threatening bleeding. This raises a difficult but necessary question: who at your school is prepared to respond in those first moments?

If school nurses, playground attendants, and teachers were trained, our children would be safer. Massive hemorrhage from a femoral artery laceration can generally be controlled with the proper application of a tourniquet. We want to help prevent educators from living through the nightmare of watching their students die from treatable injuries.

Our schools should be safe places for children to learn.

When teenagers shot high school students at Springfield High School, our country mourned. But none of this is new. The earliest recorded schoolhouse active violent incident was in Greencastle, Pennsylvania in 1764 where the schoolteacher and ten children were killed. Although obviously occurring under very different circumstances, there were additional events occurring at schools throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Not until the University of Texas massacre in 1966 where 17 were killed, 31 injured, did we start seeing modern-day increases in the number of casualties. In 1998, the attention turned from high schools and universities to elementary schools where our most vulnerable play in schoolyards.

Although not all injuries can be handled in a classroom setting, teachers who are trained can provide critical assistance before EMS arrives.

While Run-Hide-Fight is a plan, what if we had a more complete plan? What if we trained our teachers to TREAT?

The White House launched a Stop the Bleed campaign in 2015, encouraging every American to get trained to stop massive hemorrhage, to obtain tourniquet training, and save lives. Teachers, educators, and youth leaders should be at the forefront of this movement.

“No matter how rapid the arrival of professional emergency responders, bystanders will always be first on the scene. A person who is bleeding can die from blood loss within five minutes, therefore it is important to quickly stop the blood loss. Those nearest to someone with life-threatening injuries are best positioned to provide first care. According to a recent National Academies of Science study, trauma is the leading cause of death for Americans under age 46. Remember to be aware of your surroundings and move yourself and the injured person to safety, if necessary.” – US DHS Stop the Bleed.

Where to Start

We’ve developed a 2.5 hour course specially for teachers to learn an overview of this material. You can take the course online, when and where you have time. The lectures are engaging, use diagrams and photographs to clearly explain the science and the tactics behind what you should do.

What if your school had a trauma kit colocated with the AED and you learned how to save kids’ lives from a more frequent cause of death instead of just learning CPR? What if you need that trauma kit had high-quality supplies in it that would make a difference in an emergency, more than bandaids and ice packs?

What This Training Teaches

This training helps educators: 

• Recognize life-threatening injuries 

• Control severe bleeding and manage critical injuries

 • Understand priorities during medical emergencies 

Respectful, Practical Instruction

This course is taught by Dr. Mike Shertz, an Emergency Medicine physician and former U.S. Army Special Forces Medic.

Mike’s teaching style is calm, clear, and focused on understanding rather than fear. The goal is to equip educators with knowledge and confidence to care for students and colleagues until emergency services arrive.

With a small investment, you could train right alongside the videos from your living room or computer this weekend. By Monday, you could walk back into your school, look each student in the eye, knowing you could provide a holistic idea of how to keep your students safe, and how to treat them if they needed to you to do so.

Explore More Information

To see effective use of direct pressure to stop bleeding and for an improvised technique, you can use on massive hemorrhage with kids, look at the direct clamshell pressure and pediatric improvised tourniquet videos, and more in our articles archive. To see a middle schooler teaching her classmates some of these basic skills, you can check out the article.

For a teacher’s perspective, Deepwaterhappy.com has some articles about a Florida teacher’s preparations for her classroom. She’s also got some great resources on how teachers can get first aid kits to deal with massive hemorrhage for their classrooms. For those wanting more in-depth training, consider taking Tactical Casualty Care, our 10-hour online course.