US high school students to receive ‘trauma training’ to prepare for ‘mass casualty events’ - report
High school-age children in the United States are set to receive “life-saving trauma training” funded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in an effort to prepare them for “mass casualty events”.
The DHS has issued a $1.8 million grant to create the program, according to federal procurement documents obtained by The Young Turks (TYT) news organization.
The ‘School-Age Trauma Training’ program aims to provide “the knowledge necessary to stabilize the injured and control severe bleeding until first responders arrive on the scene”.
SCOOP: DHS to train high schoolers in "proper bleeding control techniques" in preparation for "mass casualty events," federal docs I found show.“Similar to how students learn health education and driver’s ed, they must learn proper bleeding control."https://t.co/42Di39fIQT
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) August 13, 2018
The documents do not identify the kinds of mass-casualty events that children will be trained for, TYT said, but they compared the training to health education and driver’s education. They say students must learn how to use their hands to apply pressure to wounds when nothing else is available. The documents also outline the use of “proper bleeding control techniques using commonly available materials,” explaining that victims can die from uncontrolled bleeding within five to 10 minutes and that anyone can act as a first responder if they know what to do.
The training program comes as the US is struggling to deal with an epidemic of school shootings, with the Trump administration being accused by some of failing to do more to address the problem.
In the aftermath of the shooting at the Stoneman Douglas High school in Parkland Florida, which left 17 people dead, students around the country called on the White House to act, staged mass school walkouts and launched voter-registration campaigns.
Trump and other Republicans faced a backlash after the Parkland shooting when they called for school teachers to be armed instead of enacting new gun control laws.
Trump said at the time, that if schools were mandated to be “gun-free zones” it would give an “open invitation” to shooters to enter because there would be “no deterrent” stopping them.
Two Republican congressmen last month told comedian Sacha Baron Cohen that they supported firearms training for pre-school age children so they could protect themselves in a shooting event.
The $1.8 million federal grant will fund the program for three years, but the DHS envisages a “strategic business plan” to solicit donations after that point in order to make the program a “long-term self-sustaining mechanism”.
