Jackie Smith

Times Herald

Three trainees hovered around a plastic dummy named George Clooney late Wednesday morning, preparing to administer an IV in its forearm.

A few minutes earlier, two of them demonstrated how to intubate other subjects.

Those are skills the students have been learning in their second semester in the paramedics certification program at St. Clair County Community College. All of them — Brandon Armstead, 20, of Marysville; Andrew Booms, 23, of Harbor Beach; and Brad Roff, 25, of Sandusky — said they enrolled because they want to help people.

“An EMT can only do basic. As a paramedic, you can do so much more (advanced life support) skills,” Booms said. “You can do so much on your own with just protocols versus in a hospital and getting a doctor’s orders. More of your own decisions, kind of your own boss in a rig.”

At SC4, the county’s only training opportunity for paramedics, Armstead, Booms and Roff are three of just five students currently enrolled in the program.

Roger McClelland, SC4’s emergency services program director, said there were nine students in the program during the 2015-16 school year. He is new to his position but has also been an instructor for three years.

Student numbers in other health-related fields, such as the certified nursing assistant and emergency medical technician programs, have also been “fairly low” recently, said Tom Kephart, director of marketing and recruitment at the college. McClelland said there are 10 students in the basic EMT program.

Overall enrollment at SC4 continues a slow decline, similarly to other schools statewide, following boom times when the recession sent the unemployed to community colleges in search of new opportunities.

Kephart said SC4 enrolled peaked near 5,000 in about 2009. Since then, he said enrollment dipped to about 3,800 in fall 2015 and 3,700 in 2016. Enrollment is “holding steady” at 3,700 this winter, he said.

He said SC4 has “been less hit” by declines than other schools.

Nonetheless, “ways to increase enrollment” was on the agenda for the SC4 Board of Trustees during a Feb. 3 retreat and Kephart said the college is actively looking for “a change in strategy” to draw more students.

That includes revamping how the college gets information about specific opportunities out to prospective students.

“It’s kind of been an ongoing process over the last nine months or so to try and get that message out in some different ways to try and make that case,” Kephart said. “… We decided we were going to make (a) re-concerted effort to make direct contact with students, with high school counselors, with teachers, which as something that we just weren’t doing as well as we could have prior to that.”

Kephart said that also entails further reaching out with college-day events, parent, community and student groups and rebuilding those types of relationships.

A part of that enrollment discussion is Ken Cummings, executive director of Tri-Hospital EMS, the county’s largest employer of paramedics.

Cummings said he talked with SC4 President Deborah Snyder Feb. 3 about ways to draw more interest in the field. Though he didn’t identify specific avenues, he said he is concerned there aren’t enough enrollees to fill future needs at Tri-Hospital EMS and other agencies.

Currently, Tri-Hospital EMS offers its own EMT program, and Operations Manager Trish May said tuition reimbursement is available for more advanced training.

Cummings said increasing demand for service in St. Clair County — growing at a rate of roughly 3.5 percent to 4 percent a year — that has him worried where future paramedics will come from. The service mans nine stations and 10 ambulances.

“That means we have to accommodate that growth by adding more ambulance coverage,” he said. “While we’re not really losing people — we have a small turnover rate — what we’re struggling with is hiring more people to fill that increase in demand.”

Jerry Doan, who was interim Clay Township fire chief until last week, also talked about a shortage of paramedics during a board meeting earlier this month.

The township’s fire department has two full-time paramedics on regular rotations and some part-time paramedics, but he told the board Feb. 6, “It’s been very difficult in the six weeks that I’ve been here; there is overtime consistently.”

Cummings said declining enrollment isn’t the only cause of the shortage. He said state-level changes, such as requiring programs to be nationally accredited — changes he said he agreed with — may have reduced the number of places the training is offered.

A few years ago, he said, there were close to 50 paramedic training programs in the state. Today, there are fewer than 30.

“That’s not very many training programs for 83 counties and about 200 transporting ambulance services here in the state of Michigan,” Cummings said. “Everyone is trying to draw personnel from that limited pool of resources.”

Kephart said the paramedic and EMT programs are still pretty new.

More time may help them grow, and he said the college has done what it can to ensure enough students are enrolled. EMT training, for example, was aimed to be a credit program, he said, but switched to a non-credit format to keep it going this year.

“Five is pretty small, but at the same time, you kind of have to prime the pump,” Kephart said of paramedics. “If you don’t run the program, you never get it off the ground, and nobody finds out what a great program it could be.”

McClelland said the current paramedics group has about two more classes and an internship to go in their training.

Armstead, Booms and Roff said they aren’t sure yet where they’ll end up, but Armstead said he’s looking forward to what comes with the job — something he doesn’t think comes with nursing or other health professions.

“It requires a lot of problem-solving and thinking,” he said. “And as a paramedic, you’re never in the same building every day.”

Contact Jackie Smith at (810) 989-6270 or jssmith@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @Jackie20Smith.