A fast-acting, first-grade teacher at a Michigan elementary school is being hailed as a hero after alerting the school principal that her online student’s grandmother was having a stroke.
According to CNN, Julia Koch was teaching her first-graders during the virtual learning class at Edgewood Elementary School on September 22 when she received a call from a grandparent who was having technical difficulties.
Koch spoke to Cynthia Phillips, who was having trouble charging her granddaughter’s school tablet when the teacher noticed something was off in the grandmother’s voice.
“It was clear there was something very wrong. Her words were so jumbled, and I couldn’t understand what she was trying to say,” Koch told CNN. “She didn’t sound like herself.”
Koch immediately jumped into action, calling the school’s principal Charlie Lovelady, who then got another staff member to call 911 while he stayed on the phone with Phillips.
“I noticed her speech was impaired, and I asked her if she was alright, and she was stumbling over her words, and it was getting worse by the minute,” Lovelady told CNN. “I knew the symptoms of a stroke because I lost my father from a stroke, so I told her hold on and immediately got her help.”
Not only did Principal Lovelady stay on the phone while the ambulance was en route. He also got two school employees to race to Philips’s house to help out with the children left in their grandmother’s care.
