Salina ? The Salina school district said it is checking to make sure fresh blood isn’t being used in classrooms after a high school teacher was suspended for allowing students to reuse the same instrument to draw blood from their fingers as part of a class project.

It has not been standard procedure for several years to use real blood in the Salina school district, spokeswoman Carol Pitts said, and employees are trained at the beginning of each school year on the dangers of handling blood and other body fluids.

Salina South High School teacher Terri Nicholson was suspended with pay Tuesday after the school learned that she had allowed nearly two dozen students in two classes to use the same lancet, or small pin, to draw blood. Nicholson, who was teaching two anatomy and physiology classes, was new to South High School but had taught elsewhere, Pitts said.

Pitts said the district would pay for two series of blood tests for all the students in the two classes.

“Once we get through making sure the students are taken care of, there’s a lot of other procedures we’ll be looking at,” Pitts said. “We want to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

Real blood hasn’t been used on the college level for decades, because of safety concerns and convenience, said Art Neuburger, chairman of the biology department at Kansas Wesleyan University.

“If it’s done properly, using separate lancets, and dispose of them properly in a bleach solution, there’s really no risk; that got to be such a hassle,” he said.

Some alternatives to real blood include simulated blood and commercially prepared, ready-to-use microscope slides, he said.

Several southeast Kansas school superintendents who were in Salina on Wednesday for a meeting said the incident was a major topic of discussion.

“We all said we’d better go back and make sure we’re not doing that,” said Bob Goodwin, superintendent of the Southeast of Saline School District, who said his district does not use real blood. “In a school or a business, there are so many things that can trip you up.”

“We’ll discuss it. It was an incident that created quite a stir,” said Richard Harlan, superintendent at Twin Valley, Bennington-Tescott. “I want to make sure our procedures are correct.”