LEDGER — Mitchell County Schools are now more prepared for the worst case scenario of a school shooting.
On Monday, Nov. 30, Blue Ridge Regional Hospital donated 180 Stop The Bleed kits to the school system.
The bleeding-control kits can help save lives in dire situations, like an active school shooting, where emergency service personnel cannot reach critically injured individuals quickly enough.
According to Executive Director of Facilities Kim Hodshon, the school system started looking at the kits after she attended a safety training earlier this year in Buncombe County.
At the training, she heard from the lead officer who was over the Stoneman Douglas High School Shooting in Parkland, FL in 2018 in which a gunman opened fire killing 17 people and injuring 17 others.
“He said the people who did pass away could have been saved by a Stop The Bleed kit,” she said. “So, I came back to the team and said this is something we really have to pursue and Shane [Vance] said he would make some calls to some contacts at the hospital. So, that’s how it came about and why we were really pushing for the kits.”
School Resource Officer Shane Vance said after doing research into school shooting incidents, they wanted to get the kits into the schools in order to create the safest environment possible for the students of Mitchell County.
“We got to looking at what we needed in the schools as far as safety and doing some research on some school shootings across the country,” he said. “We saw that, statistically, if those schools would have had these kits in place a lot of lives could have been saved.”
Vance said if the worst were to happen, they wanted to be as prepared as possible.
“We want to make sure we’re taking every precaution and every step possible in case something bad happens,” he said. “We want to be prepared. We don’t want to look back and say, ‘I wish we would have had this’ and ‘I wish we would have had that.’”
The kits will be dispersed at every school in the county. Each one contains a tourniquet, control dressing, a pair of protective gloves, a compression bandage, a marker and an instructional pamphlet.
“If something bad happens, we’re going to be trained and prepared and it’s a great thing,” Vance said. “We can save lives...Mitchell County is on top when it comes to safety and everything in place for our kids.”