By Kailey Davis

G-E senior

Every Glenville-Emmons student is required to take health in 10th grade, but none of them thought they would come out of the class being certified to save a life. This quarter, 10th grade students were offered CPR, AED and first aid certification training, all for an affordable price.

“We’re the only school this size in southern Minnesota who is doing this as a class,” said Kortney Ihnen, the high school health and social studies teacher, who certified the students.

All students took the course and received the training, but only 17 of the 35 students are being certified, which required paying for a resuscitation mask and passing a few more tests.

“Even the students who didn’t get certified will know what to do in a situation and be able to help,” said Ihnen.

With the community level certification that the students received, they can perform CPR, use an automatic electronic defibrillator and do basic first aid.

“My hope is that the students never have to use what they learned in the training, but if something does happen, they will be better off because the students know what to do,” said Ihnen.

The training took one month with three weeks online and one week of hands-on learning. If the students would have taken this training somewhere else, it would have only taken 12 hours, but since the health class only meets for 50 minutes every day, it took a lot more time together.

“It was time-consuming to learn. Because it is so important, we all wanted to learn it properly and not just breeze through it,” said Jamie Williamson, a sophomore in the class.

Ihnen put in a lot of hard work and time to make the training affordable. Normal training and certification would cost the average person $150, but with the help from the YMCA and Rochester’s Red Cross, students only had to pay $8 to be certified.

“I wanted to make sure being certified was affordable for the kids. I feel it’s really important to have people who know CPR and first aid, and I wanted to give the kids a chance to learn it,” said Ihnen.