By Lauren Johnson

“Through a combined effort with the Brundidge Rotary Club and the Pike County Board of Education, we were able to secure 100 Stop the Bleed Kits,” said Jacob Fannin, local coordinator for the National Stop the Bleed Initiative and owner of Shady Grove Tactical.

Fannin explained that these kits will provide pre-hospital trauma care to potential victims of a mass casualty incident in the school systems.

Each kit can treat approximately three patients, and will “contain a tourniquet, trauma dressing, a chest seal, and several other items that are essential for immediate response to a massive hemorrhage, which is the leading cause of death in trauma,” Fannin stated.

“Let’s just say you have 20 kits per school spread out across the campus and you multiply each kit times three, you’re looking at a pretty dramatic effect,” Fannin said.

Planning to spread these kits evenly to all the county schools including Brundidge, Pike County, Goshen, and Banks, it will provide immediate response for an uncontrolled hemorrhage, close the trauma gap, and save lives inside the school system.

“These kits will allow the teachers and the students to close the trauma gap and immediately respond to somebody who may be potentially bleeding to death inside the school, should some type of traumatic incident occur,” Fannin said.

“This kit is something that we hope to never have to use, but we want to make sure that it’s there just in case,” said Mark Head, the administrative assistant to the superintendent for prevention support in special education.

“We will be meeting with the teachers in August to train all the staff on how to use this equipment,” Fannin said, “then we’ll have an opportunity to teach the kids how to use them and be effective in the field.”

With the help of technology and resources like Jacob Fannin, Head explains that the training has been made to be as simplistic as possible.

Through this training, the goal is to make everyone feel comfortable using the items within these kits, so if a traumatic event were to occur no time would be lost.

Mark Head has been working together with Dr. Bazzell to make safety an even greater priority in the Pike County school system. These Stop the Bleed Kits are another step towards maintaining this priority.

“Unfortunately, with these kinds of things, funding is always an issue,” said Head, “so we certainly appreciate Jacob Fannin, the Brundidge Rotary Club, and the Pike County Board of Education for allowing us to seek these things out.”

The goal is to eventually expand to have one kit in each classroom and to bring these kits to the city school system.

Fannin said, “My goal is to acquire another $4,600 to do this for the city schools in the future. Right now, this is strictly for county school systems.”