EMS Magazine`s Resource Guide: Pediatric Care: Teen Program Takes the "Helpless" Out of Schools

September 2004: School districts in six states are warned by federal officials that a computer disk found in Iraq contained photos, floor plans and other information about their schools, along with a May 2003 Department of Education report titled Practical Information on Crisis Planning: A Guide for Schools and Communities.

Even with no specific threats attached, that's some ominous stuff. If you really want to strike at a people's hearts, target their kids. And if you're serious about preparing for disasters-both the natural variety and the manmade kind inherent to our times-you have to prepare the kids, too.

That's the idea behind Teen School Emergency Response Training, or Teen SERT. Derived from the national Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) concept, the program trains high schoolers to act as emergency responders in the event of an incident on their campus.

Designed for students 14-18, the program's curriculum is largely based on the national CERT program, but with some modifications for the contained environment of a school.

"The kids are taught self, school and family," says Haley Rich, who left her emergency services job with the El Paso County (CO) Sheriff's Office to advocate for the program nationally. "CERT's emphasis on checking on your neighbors, taking care of your community is downplayed-it's self- and family-focused, not save-the-world-focused."

Teen SERT had its national pilot rollout in 2003 at Pueblo West High School, which Rich's daughters attend. It was funded through a grant from the Colorado Division of Emergency Management, and taught students such essentials as preparedness, fire safety, basic disaster medicine, light search and rescue, terrorism recognition and disaster psychology.

This content, however, is flexible. Other schools can adapt and modify the basic curriculum to their own needs and priorities. They can form actual response teams or just train students for an individual awareness.

"We didn't want to be saying, 'This is how it needs to be done,'" says Rich. "We wanted it to be a template that people can customize to fit their needs. That's the beauty of it, because it gives the schools ownership of the program."

As Teen SERT has spread-it was in 30 schools in 19 states by the beginning of May-it is also exposing kids to potential careers in the emergency services. While it's taught by instructors (often regular teachers) who have gone through CERT's train-the-trainer component, lessons are supplemented by speakers from the response community who share their experiences and assist with hands-on demonstrations. Kids who want more training after taking the program can receive further mentoring and move beyond the school to things like public-education presentations and working public events.

"It's proactive-going to the county fair or the chili festival, for instance, and partnering up with local emergency management in distributing information and giving demonstrations," says Rich. "The kids are going to be partnered up with the response community to observe training sessions. So they'll see the providers going through the training, and they'll be exposed to those fields, really being side-by-side with the responders."

A vocational program starting in the fall may even include ride-alongs. Out of the 150 kids presently taking the program at Pueblo West, Rich says, 110 have expressed interest in pursuing such opportunities.

Teen SERT is not a formal government program, and schools have to find their own sources to fund it. Certain homeland security grants may be one option; private grants have also been utilized.

The training has shown its value in more than just disaster situations. One SERT student identified heart attack symptoms in her grandmother and helped get her to the hospital; another splinted an injured snowboarder's broken arm. That's the kind of day-to-day usefulness that truly underscores the program's value. It's certainly a useful adjunct to EMS.

And the students seem to like it.

"If every teenager in the nation were trained in Teen SERT," wrote one teen who took the course, "they would leave the class knowing that they could make a difference. You always hear teenagers complaining because they feel helpless, but after this program, the word helpless no longer exists."

To learn more about Teen SERT, e-mail teensert@hotmail.com or teensert1@yahoo.com.

-JE