Texas State Technical College

• Continued from Texas Southmost College
• Continued from Catalina Ambulance Service

One day, the regional representative for the Texas Department of Health EMS Division suggested that I apply for a position that was being opened at Texas State Technical College campus in Harlingen. Formerly known as Texas State Technical Institute, TSTC had just become a college, and they were going to start an emergency medical technology program.

There had already been an EMT program at TSTI but, for whatever reason, they were looking for a program chairman for what would be a greatly expanded program. TSTC-Harlingen had a satellite campus in McAllen.

I applied, as did several other people, including the guy who recommended me for the position, as it turned out.

This was the first time that I had actually had to go through an interview process without already knowing the outcome. I had interviewed for the position with the City of Los Fresnos but, even before the interview, the mayor had told me they were planning on hiring me.

I didn't expect to get the position as TSTC since there were at least a couple of people applying for the job who I thought were better qualified than myself.

Before going in, I had run several possible questions that might be asked during the interview, but I wasn't sure what to expect. Finally, I decided that I'd simply answer whatever questions were asked, the best I could, without worrying about the outcome. I already had a good job with Catalina, and could teach through Texas Southmost College whenever I wanted to, so it wasn't like I needed the job.

I interviewed with the Assistant Dean, who was overseeing that part of the campus. The interview began as a formal interview, but soon became much less formal. As it turned out, the assistant dean was from Los Fresnos and had heard good things about me during the six years that I was employed by the city, and I was still volunteering in Los Fresnos whenever I was in the city.

I left the interview knowing that it had gone well, not expecting to get the job that I had applied for, but thinking that perhaps I'd be offered an instructor position instead. However, not long afterward, I was asked to come in for another interview. As it turned out, the second interview was more about salary offers and other requirements for the program, as they had decided to hire me.

I was given a fairly hefty budget to get the program going, including equipment, two full-time instructors and some part-time assistant instructors. Since it was a new program, I could order equipment from whoever I wanted to, so I was able to get some good prices. Otherwise, through a state college program, I would be required to order only from approved vendors who would often charge nearly twice as much that I would spend if I were buying the same piece of equipment from another vendor. Although it wasn't my money, that was still annoying.

I had a month to put the program together before the start of my first quarter, and that was a lot of work. For one thing, I had two campuses to contend with, and they were about forty miles apart.

To begin with, I was budgeted for two full-time instructors, so I had to hire them. Once again, since it was a new program and I had only a month to go, I wasn't required to go through the ordinary process of posting job openings and interviewing, so I was able to hire two people who I knew fairly well. One had already been an instructor with the TSTI program, and was familiar with the campus, while the other was a former student and co-worker of mine, and they both became the program chairmen of the two campuses after I left, and they split into separate colleges, so I guess they were good choices.

I let them choose the assistant instructors they needed, while I chose a few to help with the classes that I needed assistants for, which were mostly skills classes where the class was separated into groups of people.

As far as equipment and supplies went, it was like Christmas every day, as the stuff that I had ordered came in.

EMT-Intermediate students had to successful start a specified number of IVs, either in a pre-hospital or hospital setting, as well as accomplishing at least one intubation. Since paramedics were generally averse to allowing students to intubate patients, this was usually done in a hospital setting.

However, something had gone wrong previously with the TSTI EMT program and Valley Baptist Medical Center, the main hospital in Harlingen, and VBMC was not allowing EMT students to intubate patients. That was a problem because my Harlingen campus was my larger campus, and it would be a problem to try to fit them into the McAllen hospitals, given that I had another campus there.

I arranged to speak to the board of physicians who were responsible for approving or disapproving a program for student intubations, but everyone had seemed pretty negative about it, so I expected to be scolded for whatever it was that had caused a problem with the previous program, even though I hadn't been involved.

I came in with notes, recommendations from the Texas Department of Health, and a copy of the law that absolved the hospital or surgeons from liability in such cases, and felt prepared to give it my best argument.

I was introduced, and the chairman told the other members of the board that I was there to ask if the TSTC EMT program could be approved for student intubations, under the supervision of the anesthesiologist and surgeon, of course.

Before I said a word, one of the other doctors said, "I don't see a problem with that."

Another agreed; they took a vote and it was unanimous.

I later set up similar agreements with two hospitals in McAllen and one in Brownsville, anticipating that some of my students might be from Brownsville.

Next, I had to take what I had been teaching as single classes (EMT-B, EMT-I and EMT-P) and break them down into a dozen or more courses each, since that was required in a college course, as opposed to the certificate courses that I had taught previously. Having never developed curricula before, I had to learn how to do that. I guess I did okay, because very few rewrites were required, and no major ones.

I was kept busy, though. Being the competitive sort, I wanted my program to become one of the largest ones on campus, and we did become the second largest. Within a couple of years, I had more than a hundred students on each campus each quarter and, as some of the programs interloped, there were times when I had a total of nearly four hundred students during the same quarter.

I was in class from 8:00 am to 12:00 pm at the Harlingen campus, Monday-Friday. I would drive through a fast-food place and eat lunch on my way to the McAllen campus, where I was in class from 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm. On Mondays and Wednesdays, I had night classes in Harlingen from 6:00 pm to 10:00 pm, and in McAllen on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We had Saturday classes on both campuses from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm. Although I had an instructor conducting these classes on both campuses, our Saturday classes were mostly skills classes, so I would spend a few hours helping out at one campus each Saturday, and then drive to the other. Some Sundays, I was proctoring students who were doing internships at one hospital or another, although I usually had someone else doing that.

I was young(er) then, and I enjoyed it. One minor irritant occurred while we were in line during a graduation. I was behind the dean and the college president, who were discussing the program chairman of the nursing assistant program, and they were talking about how wonderful she was, being involved in several committees and volunteering to take charge of one thing or another. I thought, of course she has time for that stuff. She takes in only fifteen students a quarter, and she has two full-time instructors, so she doesn't do anything else for a living, while I had nearly four hundred students, and was in class from 8:00 am to 10:00 pm every day but Sunday.

Of course, I didn't have to work myself that hard. I could have limited my classes to twenty students a quarter, allowed my instructors to teach most of the classes, and I doubt that anyone would have questioned it.

I took it on myself, by the way, to guarantee that anyone who passed my program would pass the state certification exam. If they failed, I would teach a remedial course for them between quarters, or allow them to sit in on my other classes until they could pass the state exam. Very few students had to take me up on this; because my classes were not easy, anyone passing the program should be able to be certified.

Probably, I should have stayed with TSTC. I often regret leaving because it paid well, I enjoyed it, and there was a lot of stability to it. However, one quarter we were told that the college was facing some severe budget cuts. Everyone's contract renewal was delayed, and we were left wondering if our programs were going to be continued.

During that time, I began looking at other options. I had enough money in the bank to survive quite well for a couple of years if I had to. Computers were fairly new at the time, and I had written some of the first computer tutorials for EMS classes, offering them as shareware, selling several individual and site licenses, so I decided to see if I could make a go of it.

I wrote a letter of resignation. As it turned out, everyone was going to receive their contract renewals, and they did try to talk me into staying, but I had decided to move on.

Unfortunately, about that time, Microsoft Windows came out. I didn't know how to write code for that format, and didn't really want to learn. I did buy a compiler but I couldn't motivate myself to learn another code. Instead, I took a year off, running a computer BBS and sometimes trying to figure out how to code for Windows.

I took some shifts with Los Fresnos EMS, which had since become an all-paid service. That was convenient since I still lived in Los Fresnos but I think the guy who had been hired as the EMS Director felt uncomfortable having me there, since I had been the director there for several years, and knew everyone. One day, he showed up on an accident scene while he was off duty, and it was clear that he had been drinking. Since he was involving himself in treating patients at the scene, I quietly asked him to leave it to us, mentioning that if I could tell that he had been drinking, others could as well. He left and I never mentioned it to anyone, but he never scheduled me for another shift.

I ended up buying into a private ambulance company, along with a friend of mine.

• Continued on Advanced Cardiac & Trauma

 

During my years of teaching EMTs, EMT-Special Skills, and EMT-Paramedic classes, to the best of my knowledge, I never had a student fail either the state certification exam or the National Registry licensure exam. For one thing, on my own time, I offered a refresher course if the period from the completion of my course and the next scheduled exam date was more than a week.

For another, at least half the questions in the state certification test bank were ones that I had submitted. Unlike most EMS instructors, I enjoyed writing multiple-choice tests. While most instructors would use questions that were available from the textbook publishers, I wrote most of my own tests, although I reworded and used some of the publisher's questions because I knew they would be on the licensure exams. But the state accepted questions submitted by Texas EMS instructors.

There were some rules involved, such as gender neutrality, but I submitted a bunch of them to the test bank. The way it worked was that submitted questions were either accepted or rejected, with no notice made to the submitter. Accepted questions were sorted into topic areas and by difficulty. When certification tests were generated, they would draw a specified number of questions from each topic area to create a 200-question test, with a specified percentage of each of, I think, three difficulty levels.

For the first couple of years, they would create a few such tests per year, so students from several classes would be taking the same test. However, some students were passing test questions on to other students who hadn't taken the test yet, as there were several regional testing locations and dates.

As the state's computer program became more sophisticated, they would create individual tests for each student, so students sitting next to one another wouldn't even be taking the same test.

EMTs and paramedics would have to re-test every couple of years, so I would take the paramedic recertification every two years, and most of the questions were ones that I had written. Coincidentally, my scores were very high. I had students tell me that every question on their certification exam were ones that s/he had seen on my class tests.

 

At our Harlingen campus, my EMT program was housed in a large portable building. As the second-largest program on the campus, that was supposed to be temporary but I preferred the portable building to sharing a brick building with the nursing assistant program. Only my program used the building so I could stage things ahead of time, and there was also the fact that the college had only one computer per building and we weren't allowed to bring our own computers. In the brick building, I'd have to share the computer with the nursing program, which had a program chairman and three full-time instructors. In the portable building, I had a computer all to myself. When it came time for a computer upgrade, I hid our computer in the closet. When they came by to pick up the old computers, I suggested, without actually saying so, that I thought someone had already picked it up. That worked, so we ended up with two computers for our building. My full-time instructor had the older one, and I had the new one.

The best part was that, because only my program used the building, I didn't have to pick everything up before leaving the classroom, and could stage things for the following day ahead of time. I could also schedule impromptu cram sessions for those who needed them, while in the regular buildings everything had to be on the syllabus.

Since I was teaching EMTs and paramedics, we'd introduce some realism every now and then. One day, I arranged with the Harlingen Police and Fire Departments, as well as Campus Security and the local EMS service, to stage a school shooting. While I began my class, as usual, covering whatever might have been on the schedule that day, my other instructor and volunteers from other EMS services, most of whom had been in previous classes of mine, along with the police and fire departments, set the stage for a school shooting in an adjacent brick building. This was a Saturday and mine was the only program in session that day, but my students didn't necessarily know that.

While I was teaching my class, the police shot off a succession of gunshots, probably using blanks or shooting into something safe, I didn't know the details of that. There was a lot of screaming going on, followed by police sirens and emergency lights. One of the campus security people came in, acting panicked, and warned everyone to stay put because there was a shooting. At that point, I turned my radio on, which had been tuned to a non-emergency channel, in which a police dispatcher (or someone pretending to be a police dispatcher) was communicating with the police about a shooting, and everything involved with that.

Then there were two other shots, and the police radioed in - on the non-emergency channel - that the shooter was down. A few minutes later they called in that the scene was secure, and was asking for EMS, saying there were multiple casualties.

Of course, I sent my class in to help. EMS was there, and several students were lying or sitting in various places in the building, professionally moulaged to simulate gunshot wounds and some other injuries, as well as an older person pretending to be having a heart attack. It looked very real and was a terrific learning experience.