Macy Shrum made gagging noises Wednesday evening as she packed gauze into an open “wound” in a thigh-sized foam cylinder. The 24-year-old kindergarten teacher at Hughes Road Elementary in Dickinson had never undergone any type of emergency training nor had she seen someone with a deep cut in real life. Lifting a peach-colored flap, she closed her eyes and let out a small squeal.

“I would be terrible if the real thing happened,” Shrum said. “But I think I’d be better now that I’ve done this.”

Add traumatic bleeding training to the list of skills being taught to teachers in Texas and nationwide after several high-profile school shootings in 2018 led education leaders to seek the best ways to prevent and prepare for campus-based violence.

In the months after a teenager killed 10 and wounded 13 during a rampage at Santa Fe High School last May, schools across Houston told the Chronicle they would beef up security and mandate more safety training for teachers. While many said they increased the number of active shooter drills schools, only a handful opted to show teachers how to stop life-threatening bleeding caused by gunshots or other traumatic injuries.

Only three of 25 school districts surveyed by the Houston Chronicle last August said they would provide official Stop the Bleed training: Dickinson, Friendswood and Santa Fe ISDs. A handful of schools in Galveston County and some charter and private schools also signed up.

Those numbers could change soon. State Rep. Barbara Gervin-Hawkins, D-San Antonio, has filed a bill in Austin that would require every school district and open-enrollment charter school to create a bleeding control program and place bleeding-control kits in their schools by Jan. 1, 2020.

Those kits would not just be for mass shooting events, said Tom Kelley, with the Texas School Safety Center. They could help with injuries caused by a wide variety of accidents that could leave a student or staff member with a life-threatening wound.

“More tools are becoming available, more funds are available, more trainings are available, and that’s because I think the public is now more aware than ever,” Kelley said. “Anyone at a school could be susceptible to bleeding injuries that could lead to death.”

Diana Grimm-Mapp, a registered nurse and program director for trauma services at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, agreed. The hospital always has offered the trainings to schools, law enforcement agencies and community groups, but recently was able to make them free thanks to a state grant. In 2017, no one signed up. Then in 2018, the year in which 17 were killed and as many injured at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, as well as the Santa Fe massacre, 50 trainings were scheduled.

“We’ve always been able to provide it, but getting schools on board to believe it’s important, to accept this training, has been challenging,” Grimm-Mapp said. “Their schedules are pretty set throughout the school year, and getting them to be available for training is a challenge.”

Friendswood ISD made time for the training during the two weeks before classes resumed last August. Stacy Guzzette, the district’s executive director of student operations, said the free training and the donation of one bleeding control kit for every defibrillator in the district was too valuable to turn down.

She also thinks the districts in and around Santa Fe were more eager to jump on the opportunity because of their proximity to that school’s massacre.

“School shootings happen across the whole nation, and every time one happens you think ‘Have we done everything we need to do” and pause. But this one was different, it was different being so close,” Guzzette said. “We have people in the community who play softball with kids in Santa Fe, employees who live in Santa Fe who drive in to work in Friendswood. It’s a lot more in your face. It’s real.”

Back at Hughes Road Elementary, second grade teacher Javana Gatewood winced at some images of mangled limbs and severed arteries as they flashed across a projector screen. Still, she said the lesson was worth more than her discomfort.

“After all of this stuff that’s happening, especially since we’ve had lock-downs and what happened in Santa Fe, of course,” Gatewood said. “I think it’ll help me by staying calm, being direct.”

shelby.webb@chron.com

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