First-Grade Teacher's Heimlich Saves Choking First-Grader

Monday was a typical morning in the first grade classroom at Atkinson Elementary School in North Andover, Mass. After a morning of schoolwork, first-graders were sitting and eating their snacks. Teacher Kayla Szettella was stationed at the front of the classroom by her desk as students socialized.

The morning quickly turned from ordinary to extraordinary.

Szettella, 23, noticed one of the first-graders, was trying to get her attention. The 6-year-old boy had placed his hands at his throat indicating he was choking. Szettella sprang into action. She told the other students to look away as she began to administer the Heimlich maneuver. She sent one of the first-graders to go fetch the school nurse.

“He was jumping up and down, and he was visibility in distress. The color on his face had changed,” Szettella said. She asked him if he could speak, and he could not.

“i just put my arms around him and I gave him two big thrusts,” Szettella said, and the stuck food came out. She said it was a Fruit by the Foot, a fruit snack that comes in one very long piece.

The nurse called the boy’s mother, who in turn picked him up.

The Heimlich maneuver is an emergency technique for preventing suffocation when a person’s airway (windpipe) becomes blocked by a piece of food or other object, according to MedLinePlus.

Szettella said she learned the Heimlich maneuver when she was 15-years-old at overnight camp one summer at Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. She has not had any first-aid refreshers since that summer, but the incident has changed her mind.

“We all need to get a refresher,” she said Friday night.

Greg Landry, principal of the elementary school, said the school is fortunate to have Szettella.

“He could not breathe,” Landry said. “It could have been tragic.”

Landry said he wanted to share the story with the community because Szettella inspired the teaching staff and community by her heroic actions, and her lifesaving skills.

“For a young teacher to take it on, and handle the situation so well,” Landry said.“She was pretty amazing in how she instantly responded.”

Szettella said the student thanked her that day.

“I’m just glad I knew what to do,” she said. When things got back to normal, she explained what had happened to her first-graders, “Just so they weren’t too freaked out.”

A letter also went home to parents informing them of the choking incident.

Szettella actually attended Atkinson Elementary School, and is now a Merrimack College fellow where she will be earning her masters degree in elementary education. Landry said she has served as a long-term substitute teacher, and as the lead teacher in a first grade class.

As far the choking victim, he is doing great.

“He came to school the next day like it never happened,” Landry said.

Photo: Kayla Szettella in her classroom.

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