One student pulled her drowning nephew out of a pool and started CPR. Another gave her choking friend the Heimlich maneuver. A third called 911 and started chest compressions on a collapsed neighbor until paramedics arrived.
Every year, a handful of Utah high school students are recognized for being "heroes" for using emergency skills they learned in school.
But the 20-year-old program, called "What to Do When Every Minute Counts," has ended for good. To help address a $1 billion shortfall in the state budget, lawmakers eliminated $300,000 set aside to train every 10th grader in CPR, the Heimlich and how to use automated external defibrillators on people suffering from sudden cardiac arrest.
That bothers Anne Rasmussen, a teaching assistant at Taylorsville High who was given the Heimlich by a 10th grader in May when she choked on a tater tot. "I started to black out; he saved me as far as I'm concerned," the 63-year-old said.
She gave her "guardian angel," Mark Moore, $60 and a card in which her husband, Arthur, thanked him for saving the "light of his life."
Lauding the program that trains 20,000 students a year, emergency medical professionals and educators plan to lobby lawmakers to restore the program in 2011.
"I'm real disappointed," said Linda Mayne, who runs the program through the state education office and will lose her job due to the cut. "It's a great life skill."
She noted the new high school health curriculum includes instruction on first aid and CPR. But it will likely lack the hands-on training students have been receiving: Firefighters and paramedics taught the class, using mannequins.
The cut was part of a $35 million hit taken by the Utah Department of Health, and there's no money in the state education budget to continue the program, either.
The bulk of the health cuts come from reducing Medicaid reimbursements to hospitals and doctors. Other cuts include ending a cervical cancer outreach program, trimming costs in tobacco cessation programs, and cutting grants to providers of primary care to low-income Utahns.
A cut to another emergency medical program also bothers firefighters: There is $500,000 less to dole out to city and county ambulance providers and fire departments for training and to buy equipment such as defibrillators, gurneys and radios.
The legislature cut the budget to $895,400 and said urban county agencies and cities with a population above 10,000 don't qualify for the money.
Ogden Fire Chief Mike L. Mathieu said that means he can't buy more equipment to better help patients in respiratory distress, or advanced cardiac equipment that would detect heart attacks more quickly, speeding up patient care once they arrived at the hospital.
"It challenges our ability to provide some of the latest technology that's available to us," he said, adding that all areas of the state need funding, not just rural Utah.
And Ron Morris, the state fire marshal and chairman of the state committee that awards the grants, pointed out a flaw in the Legislature's formula: While they meant to help rural areas, the only county that will go without is Iron. The Salt Lake County town of Bluffdale got almost $5,000.
"They should leave the [decision of] who gets the money up to the expertise of the committees that have been doing it for many, many years," he said.
