On Sept. 4 at McAnnulty Elementary School in the Baldwin-Whitehall School District, a teacher's aide got the ultimate test of her job -- and a friend for life.

Jan Tomnay was sitting beside Edin Durakovic, a kindergartner with special needs who is assigned to her care, as he ate a sandwich during lunchtime in the cafeteria.

Suddenly, Edin, 5, started to cough.

"Then he quit coughing, grabbed his throat and looked at me with a stricken face," recalled Mrs. Tomnay, 52, of Whitehall.

"I thought he wasn't breathing."

She struggled to free her legs from beneath the children's table and then performed the Heimlich maneuver, a procedure to dislodge an object from the throat of someone who is choking by performing squeeze-thrusts on the person's abdomen.

When nothing happened, she did it more forcefully a second time. Her actions forced the sandwich out of his throat so that she could remove it from his mouth.

"He cried. I scooped him up and took him to the nurse's office. He was clinging onto me for dear life," Mrs. Tomnay recalled.

Edin, the son of Alma and Ismail Durakovic, of Baldwin Borough, has cerebral palsy and uses a walker.

After he was checked and cleared by the nurse, Mrs. Tomnay asked him if he wanted to go outside and play. He said "yes."

As the nurse led him away, the magnitude of what had just happened hit Mrs. Tomnay.

"I started crying. I had to get a drink of water and compose myself," she said.

Principal Daniel Emanuelson praised her actions.

"It was exactly what you want to happen: She was emotional after the fact but kept her head and did what she was supposed to do," he said.

Mrs. Tomnay learned the Heimlich maneuver through cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, training provided by the district about 10 years ago. She is recertified every year through the district in accordance with the American Red Cross.

The state does not have any requirements related to teacher certification for life-saving or safety-related training, said Mike Race, spokesman for the state Department of Education.

The Baldwin-Whitehall district has about 26 paraprofessionals, all of whom work with special needs children. The district has about 500 special needs students.

Virginia Deasy, director of pupil services, said the district requires all paraprofessionals to be trained by the nursing staff in CPR and the Heimlich maneuver.

It also is required of some staff teachers, she said, depending on their roles, such as in crisis prevention.

Training takes place at the end of the school year.

At the Sept. 9 meeting of the school board, Ms. Deasy called Mrs. Tomnay "a Baldwin-Whitehall heroine" and said she wanted to introduce her at a future board meeting.

"I'm just so proud of her," Ms. Deasy said.

"For that paraprofessional to be that observant and see this child was in trouble in a typically noisy cafeteria, and to react as she did, I think it was marvelous," she said.