Continued from Duro Bag Company When I completed my EMT-Paramedic course and was certified as a paramedic, I was asked to help teach other classes for Texas Southmost College. At first, I was helping Tom Scott, who was the program chairman of the EMT program at TSC at the time, then I began teaching my own classes through TSC. Texas Southmost College was the first college in the Rio Grande Valley to offer emergency medical technology training. At that time, the Texas Department of Health had no criteria or certification for EMS instructors of coordinators, so I was grandfathered in as an EMS Instructor and EMS Coordinator once they were established and, in fact, helped to develop the EMS Instructor certification requirements. When I began working for the City of Los Fresnos this came in especially handy. As Los Fresnos EMS was primarily a volunteer service, the ability to hold classes right in town was a terrific recruitment tool, as well as a way of upgrading the certification levels of its volunteer personnel. Although I taught a couple of classes on TSC's Brownsville campus, most of the courses that I taught were off-campus, the majority of them in Los Fresnos, but I also taught classes for neighboring ambulance services, such as Port Mansfield and Rio Hondo, since both of these communities were located some distance from the nearest campus offering EMT courses. Through TSC, I taught Emergency Care Attendant, Emergency Medical Technician-Basic, Emergency Medical Technician-Special Skills, and Emergency Medical Technician-Paramedic courses. The EMT-SS certification was later changed to EMT-Intermediate. My employment with Texas Southmost College was on-demand. I was not a full-time instructor, although I could set up courses whenever I wanted to, and teach them through the TSC program. I remained as an off-campus instructor for TSC until I was hired as the program chairman of the Texas State Technical College EMT program. My time as an instructor for Texas Southmost College spanned my employment with the City of Los Fresnos and Catalina Ambulance Service. Continued on Texas State Technical College
I was going to continue my post in the Texas State Technical College thread but since I was teaching this class through Texas Southmost College, I'll do it here and keep things in order. While I was working for the City of Los Fresnos, I was also an off-campus instructor for TSC and a volunteer with the Los Fresnos Fire Department. I was teaching an EMT class in the Los Fresnos Library on a Saturday. While I was teaching the class, the Fire Department set up the scene for a multiple-vehicle accident, with one car in a resaca, a couple of others flipped over, and another couple of cars damaged, as well as multiple people moulaged to simulate injuries from the accident. Since I was also the EMS Director, and others in the class were either in the Fire Department or EMS Service, I would routinely have my radio on during class. Only a few people in the Fire Department knew were in on it because the drill was also going to be used to train volunteer fire personnel. When everything was in place, the dispatcher called in a request for police, fire, and ambulances for a multiple-patient motor vehicle accident. When the police "arrived" they escalated the request for multiple ambulances. My class included people from a couple of nearby EMS services who would report for the class in one of their ambulances, so we all went out to assist, a couple of us taking our back-up ambulance, as well. This was a much smaller class than the ones I would later have at TSTC. When we arrived, the city police, fire department, and EMS were on the scene, along with passersby who may or may not have known that it was all fake. We ended up with the Sheriff's Department there as well, as they were monitoring the city police channel. We hadn't notified them in advance because I didn't know that they monitored the city channel. Only so much can be learned in a classroom. At some point, you have to start putting it together.