By Karen Keller
Herald News (Passaic County, NJ)
Copyright 2006 North Jersey Media Group Inc.,
All Rights Reserved
While some recent high school graduates were sleeping in on summer break, Kyle Johnson, received a serious call on his pager.
Johnson, 17, the youngest member of the borough’s volunteer ambulance corps, leaped up and headed to the scene of a homicide on Warburton Avenue. When he arrived just after noon, he found police standing outside an apartment building. The victim had been shot and lay on the floor near the entrance to his apartment.
Johnson was one of only two of the corps’ 34 members who was able to answer the 911 call that day. They didn’t have to transport the corpse in the murder, which took place earlier this month but stood by to give emergency medical assistance to traumatized neighbors.
With volunteerism at ambulance squads statewide low for the past several years — especially for the daytime hours — corps officials are increasingly trying to get young adults like Johnson interested in joining. High school and college students offer the perfect solution to filling the volunteer shortage, they said.
“If you can get them interested in high school, then, usually, when they come home from college, they’re available in the summertime,” said Sue Van Orden, president of the New Jersey First Aid Council.
The council does not keep statistics on ambulance corps members’ ages, she said.In Hawthorne, Assistant Chief Kim Urquhart has been visiting freshmen classes at Hawthorne High School for three years now, with relative success. The school visits have added one or two new volunteers a year to the corps, she said.
Other towns are following suit.
Omar Nabulsi, ambulance corps chief of North Haledon, Haledon and Prospect Park, said he plans to recruit volunteers for the first time this fall from senior classes at local high schools.
“Everybody’s working two to three jobs, I guess, and inflation — everybody needs money,” said Nabulsi, of the downturn in ambulance corps volunteerism. By-laws for Nabulsi’s corps only allows for members ages 18 and up, so Nabulsi will focus on college-age students, he said.
Teen ambulance corps volunteers must have Emergency Medical Technician certification in order to join, just like any adult volunteer. The training lasts 120 hours and is state-funded. Young members can’t drive an ambulance before they turn 21, however, said Urquhart.
Johnson, a borough resident who graduated from Paramus Catholic High School, serves not only on the borough’s ambulance squad, but also its volunteer Fire Department, and the ambulance corps in Elmwood Park, where he grew up. He still makes time to hang out with his friends, he said, but his 36 hours of weekly volunteering come first.
Otherwise, he’d be “doing things I shouldn’t be doing,” said Johnson, who eventually wants to become a police officer.
Johnson volunteers because it’s personally satisfying. “It’s something I truly enjoy,” said Johnson.
Knowing from an early age he wanted to join an ambulance corps, Johnson approached the Hawthorne unit when he was 14, two years before he reached the state’s minimum age of 16.
Last year, the teenager won an award for having ridden 160 hours in his first five months of volunteering — well above the 100 to 125 average hours each member rides annually, said Urquhart.
Despite success stories like Johnson, however, Urquhart said not all teens are ready for the challenges facing ambulance corps members.
Those include seeing the aftermath of gruesome accidents, waking up at all hours, and sometimes not knowing whether the person you helped lived or died, said Johnson.
On their way to the hospital, some people have been startled to learn Johnson’s age, he said. But they’re more surprised than worried."They’ll look up at me and say, ‘How old are you?’”