First-graders noticed teacher’s eyes and face suddenly ‘go red’ — 3 students heroically intervened to get life-saving help
Generally, in classrooms, students learn lessons around reading, numbers and simple routines. But sometimes, unexpectedly, a time arrives that quietly reveals the depth of a bond far beyond the routine lessons. That was the kind of day a first-grade teacher, Madison Swift, 23, experienced when she walked into her classroom at Lakeview Elementary School in Colonial Heights, per WTVR.
Swift took a bite of food while teaching a student in the classroom. “I was eating while working with a student when I suddenly started choking on my food,” she recalled. In seconds, three of her first graders sensed something was terribly wrong. “She choked and she cannot breathe,” 6-year-old Dereck Contreras-Franco said. Bryson Doss, also 6, remembered the tension settling in. “All of a sudden, her face and eyes started going red,” he said, showing the gesture she made for help.
Each one reacted instinctively, in his own way, yet all with remarkable clarity. Contreras-Franco ran toward the emergency call button on the wall and pressed it without hesitation. When the office picked up, he and the rest of the students began shouting that their teacher was choking. Doss went running out of the room, “Because I knew that she was choking and I knew I needed to get another teacher,” he explained. And then there was 7-year-old Kolton Hersh, standing right beside the teacher as she struggled for breath.
“Then I pat her on her back to get the food out of her throat,” he said, demonstrating the back blows he instinctively performed. Swift remembers it in bits and pieces, the panic, the blur of faces and the sudden relief when Hersh’s back blows dislodged the food. “The student next to me bent me over and started doing back blows to my back to where I dislodged the food,” she said. Now, when she thinks about it, she sees each boy’s role with complete clarity. Franco alerted the office, Doss went to help from outside the classroom and Hersh took action right at her side. “They 100% saved my life,” Swift said while speaking to WTVR.
As the shock faded, what remained was a deep sense of gratitude and a deep and new understanding of the trust she had nurtured till now in the students. “At the beginning of the year, I built that trust and love relationship so they saw their teacher in crisis and they just kind of jumped into action right away,” she said. According to recent research published in PubMed Central by Xue Wang in November 2023, classrooms led by mindful, emotionally aware teachers often see stronger teacher-student relationships, connections that allow children to read emotions, respond with sensitivity and act decisively when something feels wrong. Swift didn’t know that this very dynamic would soon play a crucial role in saving her own life.
Later that day, the three boys got to pick from her classroom treasure box, a small gesture for an act that's huge and unforgettable. Sometimes, heroism isn’t about noise; sometimes, it is three children who simply cared enough to pay attention and act to save a life.
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