Franciscan looks to stock ‘stop the bleed’ duffels in every Greater Lafayette classroom
‘The idea was, let’s move the equipment and the training closer to the student,’ in case of mass shooting incident. Plus, WL school board member presses, fails to tighten new bully law even more.
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FRANCISCAN LOOKS TO STOCK ‘STOP THE BLEED’ DUFFELS IN EVERY GREATER LAFAYETTE CLASSROOM
There’s something about groups of teachers and school employees crowding around tables outside Lafayette Jeff’s Richard Jaeger Theater, practicing on one another the techniques of fitting and securing a combat application tourniquet.
“God forbid something like this is needed,” Alicia Clevenger, Lafayette School Corp.’s associate superintendent for elementary curriculum and instruction, said Wednesday afternoon, during a day of yearly in-school training for teachers and staff that included dealing with active shooting situations and the aftermath.
“Obviously, safety is top priority of students and staff,” Clevenger said. “We’ve got to have the wherewithal and the tools and the knowledge of what to do in an emergency situation like that.”
“Muscle memory” is what Heath Provo, a school resource officer for LSC, called it, as he went through the yearly training and classroom scenarios on the principles of ALICE – alert, lockdown, inform, counter and evacuate – if schools deal with an active shooting situation.
In the auditorium, Regina Nuseibeh, manager of the emergency and trauma services at Franciscan Health Lafayette East, went step by step about how to pack wounds and stop bleeding until emergency personnel could get on the scene. It was a program, sometimes graphic, drawn directly from lessons from a 2012 shooting spree that killed 20 students and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
New this year was an initiative from the Franciscan Health Foundation and the Franciscan Trauma Department, which are working to get “Stop the Bleed” kits into every classroom in Tippecanoe, Montgomery and Fountain counties.
Nuseibeh said Franciscan had been offering drawstring-sized bags with gauze, bandages, scissors, gloves, trauma shears and other supplies for emergency situations.
“But when you have one bag for a school or you have one bag for a classroom, there’s one amount of supplies,” Nuseibeh said. “Who’s your teacher going to triage that needs that? How are they going to decide who needs what?”
She said idea is to supply a duffle bag with enough gear to care for multiple people who might be wounded. Franciscan also will get a supply of tourniquets to each school that can be strategically placed in buildings. Nuseibeh said the supplies in each duffle will be chosen so they don’t have expiration dates, so schools don’t need to update them and they’ll be ready, if ever needed.
“We want to make sure that they’re easy to grab,” Nuseibeh said. “No one wants to think about this kind of thing. … But this is something we felt was such an important thing to do to train our community and provide our schools, just in case.”
Javan Greeson, executive director of Franciscan Health Foundation, said the goal is to raise $150,000 to supply the Stop the Bleed kits for 2,500 classrooms in the three counties. Each duffle kit costs about $60, he said.
Greeson said that with help from North Central Health Services and the Community Foundation of Greater Lafayette, the effort has $80,000 so far.
“All the schools have something right now, typically with training for school nurses or (school resource officers),” Greeson said. “The idea was, let’s move the equipment and the training closer to the student, so that if there’s an injury or there’s an accident or there’s a mass casualty event, the care is near where it needs to be. We hope this helps our teachers feel empowered to care for their students.”
Clevenger said LSC hoped to have the kits in classrooms by the end of school year.
“We’ve done these ALICE scenarios before,” Clevenger said “But because we’re getting the Stop the Bleed kits donated by Franciscan for every single classroom in our district, we thought it was imperative that teachers be familiar with the process of how to apply a tourniquet or how to deal with a puncture woman of some sort. It’s really important, because it could be a student’s or a colleague’s life on the line. You’ve got to be prepared and be able to help in any way that you can.”
What you can do: To donate or for more information, call 765-423-6810 or go to https://fran.care/stopthebleed
WL SCHOOL BOARD MEMBER BEHIND STATE LAW ON BULLYING TRIES, FAILS TO GET STRICTER POLICY FOR WEST SIDE
A school board member’s attempt to make the standards in a new state bullying law – one she was instrumental in getting introduced during the 2025 General Assembly session – even more stringent for West Lafayette schools fell short Monday night.
School board member Dacia Mumford made a case that West Side schools had “a higher ethical responsibility” to do better than a state law that now requires school officials to notify parents by the end of the next day after an incident if their child is involved in a bullying investigation. The previous law gave schools a deadline of five days to contact parents, whether their children were on either side – the suspected bully or the bullied – when allegations were made at school.
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