Days after the second-deadliest mass shooting of 2023 — a massacre at a Dallas-area mall — details are emerging that at least one San Antonio school district has announced plans to offer in-person Stop the Bleed workshops and certifications to middle school and high school kids.
Stop the Bleed — a federal campaign convened by the National Security Council Staff — is mainly focused on how to apply direct pressure and pack battlefield-type wounds. These skills are usually reserved for soldiers and first responders, however literature for the program explains that it trains "more people to become immediate responders until professional help arrives.”
So far, Northside and Northeast independent school districts have shared plans to offer the training to middle schoolers and high schoolers, according to emails sent to parents.
As a mother of two, former military spouse and one-time bartender, I have taken this course or something like it three times since 2018. Each time, it ended with me and my fellow students applying tourniquets to prosthetic limbs embellished with lifelike wounds. We also took turns stuffing the fake wounds with gauze.
It's a creepy experience — and potentially triggering for some. For perspective’s sake, some students admitted to San Antonio Stop The Bleed workshops might be as young as 11.
"When we had to practice stuffing pieces of T-shirts and tampons into a very lifelike model, I couldn’t participate," one San Antonio teacher, a survivor of a 1992 college campus shooting. She asked that her name not be used since she still teaches at a local school. "I had to watch my partner do it. And as soon as it was over, I left the room and threw up. It was extremely traumatic for me as an adult. I can not imagine having teenagers go through this.”
One has to wonder which is the lesser evil: an adolescent being traumatized by a disembodied prosthetic limb featuring a series of gaping artificial wounds or being unprepared in event of a violent tragedy. After all, with 190 U.S. mass shootings so far this year, it's just a matter of time before another one occurs in San Antonio.
Nina Rangel
A prosthetic training device awaits students at an active-shooter training session last year at Sir Winston's Pub.
In a statement, NISD spokesman Barry Perez said a Texas law requires school districts to offer Stop the Bleed training to certain staff and to students in the 7th grade and above. However, student's aren't required to take the training. So far, several half-hour in-person training sessions are available to NISD students on May 25, National Stop the Bleed Day.
Perez directed questions about the content of the courses to the district specialist facilitating session registration. She hasn't yet responded to inquiries from the Current.
NEISD Executive Director of Communications Aubrey Chancellor told the Current via email that the district sent a link to a Stop the Bleed video to parents, who could then choose to watch the video with their students. Parents were also they could request hands-on training via a group session with their child's school nurse.
"At that time, the nurse does review the bleeding control techniques and students have an opportunity to practice those skills," Chancellor said.
Vicki Ragsdale, who teaches the Stop the Bleed courses through the Southwest Texas Regional Advisory Council, told the Current she doesn't require young people in school settings to practice the tourniquets on each other. She also said she can no longer stomach offering the course to middle school- and high school-aged kids.
“The kids are so aware as to why they need this content, and that is what's disheartening to me,” Ragsdale said. “They think all the way through the process … and say, basically, 'If guns are causing this, why don't we do something about the guns?' Middle school 6th graders have the critical thinking skills to see ... that there's a bigger problem. And that's just so sad.”
To her point, Texas has increased access to firearms during the previous legislative session, doing away with its permit requirements to carry handguns and lowering the age when adults can carry handguns. Meanwhile, the state is reeling from more than a dozen mass killings of four or more people since 2021. Though a Texas House committee advanced a bill Monday that would raise the minimum age to purchase certain semi-automatic rifles, not everyone who follows such activity is optimistic.
“You’ve got myriad issues surrounding gun laws in Texas … it’s like an avalanche of bad legislation,” San Antonio resident and leader of political action committee Mothers Against Greg Abbott Tricia Gronnevik told the Current. “We’re already on par to be the deadliest mass shooting year ever. No questions asked. And it’s only the beginning of May. It’s just maddening.”
Gronnevik called out Gov. Greg Abbott for doubling down on state-level resistance to gun control and again emphasizing mental illness as the key contributor to gun violence following this weekend's deadly rampage near Dallas.
"Greg Abbott was at this church in Allen last night, railing against mentally ill people. And he was behind defunding mental health in Texas over $200 million in 2022," she said.
Roughly a dozen San Antonio moms answered a social media call for opinions on whether school districts including NISD and NEISD should be offering Stop the Bleed training for students.
Despite the disturbing subject matter it involves, the value of Stop the Bleed workshops wasn't lost on those moms. All agreed that basic first-aid content is so valuable that they would support such a curriculum being offered to their kids.
However, what’s infuriating is that the state is requiring districts to force their staff to learn EMT-level life-saving techniques rather than address the issue that leads to such a need in the first place: the wide availability of guns.
“Ban assault weapons, just ban the motherfuckers," Mothers Against Greg Abbott's Gronnevik said. "Ronald Reagan even said that civilians shouldn’t be carrying weapons of war on our streets. Where are those Republicans now?”
While it's stomach churning to think of tweens and teens being taught how to keep their classmates from bleeding out during a mass shooting, school districts are left with little alternative if state leaders refuse to deal with the root cause.
*Editor’s Note: This article has been edited to omit an incorrect distribution date of Stop The Bleed workshop information to NEISD parents.
Subscribe to SA Current newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter
