VIDEO: Akron Public Schools assistant principal saves choking student first day on the job

Arthur Clark made a new best friend on his first day of fourth grade at Betty Jane Community Learning Center: the assistant principal who saved his life.

The 9-year-old and Assistant Principal Darby Baumberger are now bonded for life after Baumberger performed the Heimlich maneuver on Arthur when he started choking during lunch on Monday.

Baumberger, in her first day as an assistant principal, was on lunch duty pushing the trash can around the cafeteria tables when she spotted Arthur hunched over and coughing as he choked on a corn dog.

While the principal ran to get the school nurse, Baumberger ran around the table, first asking Arthur if he was OK, then helping him try to dislodge the stuck corn dog. When he stopped breathing, Baumberger wrapped her arms around Arthur and thrust her clenched hands upward into his chest four times before he coughed up the food.

Security cameras caught the lifesaving act.

Thinking about what happened and describing it two days later, Arthur said it made his legs shake.

He remembers talking to his cousin, who was sitting in the row of tables in front of him. They were laughing, he said, happy to be reunited on the first day of school. The corn dog "went down my airhole," Arthur said, and before he knew it, Baumberger — whose name he had not yet learned to pronounce — had lifted him into the air and was pounding into his stomach.

"It’s good that you learned how to do that," Arthur told her Wednesday.

Baumberger — she tells the kids it's like "bomb" and "burger" — said she never had a student choke in 26 years as an educator.

She first noticed Arthur in distress when he started coughing, she said, and it didn't sound like normal coughing.

"I said, 'Are you OK? Are you OK?' " Baumberger recalled. "He wasn’t even looking at me or anything. He was just trying to get it out."

She said she was trained in the Heimlich maneuver, but in the heat of the moment, because he was still breathing, she first delivered a few whacks to Arthur's back. When he stopped breathing, she grabbed him from behind to do the upward thrusts to send a burst of air to push the food out of his throat.

The first two times, she said, she was too gentle, afraid of pushing too hard and hurting him. When it was clear that didn't work, she knew it had to be harder. The fourth thrust was successful, and Arthur — who said it was a little like taking a punch from professional wrestler John Cena — could breathe.

The school still called an ambulance to check him out, but he was able to stay at school.

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Baumberger asked the EMTs if she had done the right thing. A 911 dispatcher had instructed her after the fact not to hit Arthur on the back if he was choking. The EMTs noted the most important thing: Arthur was still alive.

Retelling the story, Baumberger's eyes filled with tears. As she began to cry, so did Arthur's mother, Ashley Howell, her arms wrapped around her only child. Arthur put his hands on his mother's arms to comfort her.

"I’m just so happy that you were there," Howell told Baumberger. "Because all I could think about was, I wasn’t there."

Howell is a nurse but was in a class when she got the call from Betty Jane. Her phone was on "do not disturb," but she has it set so calls from the school will always come through. They told her there had been an incident, and Arthur had choked and they were calling EMS. They asked if she wanted to come to the school, and Howell said she would be there immediately.

"I couldn’t even think, I’m trying to think what’s the fastest way to go to the school," she said. "I’m on the highway just panicking, thinking to myself, trying not to cry."

She hoped someone had known to do the Heimlich maneuver. Despite a broken ankle in a boot, she ran into the school. That's how Arthur said he knew his mom was scared: "She ran in her boot."

"It just was a relief when I walked in and I’d seen him drinking water and he smiled at me," Howell said. "Because that was just a terrible feeling, to know that the safety of your kid is in someone else’s hands."

Arthur and his mother decided they needed to do something special for Baumberger. They asked the front office staff what Baumberger liked, but being that it was her first day, they didn't know much about her. All they knew was she had ordered Bob Evans for lunch via DoorDash. So Arthur got his new best friend a gift card to Bob Evans and four cupcakes and he and his parents wrote Baumberger a letter expressing their gratitude.

The next day, Arthur walked in and asked the staff, "Where was the person who saved my life?" He presented Baumberger with his gifts and thanked her again.

After just one day as assistant principal, Arthur said he could tell she was "very, very good at her job."

"Your first time in the lunch, you had to save someone's life," he said.

Contact education reporter Jennifer Pignolet at jpignolet@thebeaconjournal.com, at 330-996-3216 or on Twitter @JenPignolet.

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: VIDEO: Akron Public Schools assistant principal saves choking student