PITTSBURGH – An elementary school teacher from Alaska who saved a pupil from a knife-wielding attacker was one of 22 people recognized Thursday by the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission.

Also honored was a teenager from Maine, who helped rescue a man from burning in a race-car accident in New Hampshire.

Jeffrey Carl Harriman, 52, a reading teacher from Palmer, Alaska, says he still isn’t used to having the “hero” label applied to him since he helped rescue Stephan Hansell, then 7, at Mountain View Elementary School in Anchorage on May 7, 2001.

“I like to call Will Rogers a hero of mine, so when people started calling me a hero, it didn’t feel the same,” Harriman said.

On May 7, 2001, a man carried a filet knife into the Mountain View Elementary School and stabbed or slashed three boys as they stood in line with other children for the school’s breakfast program. He then walked down the hall to a classroom and confronted Hansell and about a dozen other students.

“Kids were just streaming and pouring into the office, scared to death,” Harriman said. “That’s when I saw this guy in the school, going down to a classroom.”

Harriman followed.

“I just reacted – something was wrong with our kids. Somebody needed to take care of them and take charge of the situation,” Harriman said.

The man yanked Hansell from beneath a desk and slashed the boy’s throat. Harriman pushed the man down, buying time for the other students and another teacher in the room who scurried away.

“It was a real funny feeling, after I got in the room and I committed myself – like your hand’s caught in the cookie jar,” Harriman said. “You know you’re in a situation that you have to go through on.”

Harriman then picked up a plastic crate that was part of a science kit and stood over the bleeding boy, wielding the crate as a shield, until police arrived and subdued the man with a beanbag-shooting gun.

“He was on a – I’m not sure what to call it – some kind of religious quest, and said the only way to save the kids would be to kill them now,” said Harriman, a Christian, who tried to reason with the man.

“I told him that I believed in heaven and I believe in God and he said, ‘You’re an adult – it’s too late to save you, you’ve already sinned. The only ones I can save are these kids – if I can kill them first.”‘

In April, 34-year-old Jason Pritchard was sentenced to 99 years in prison for the knife attacks on Hansell, now 8, and three other pupils: 8-year-olds Cody Brown and Billy Moy and his brother, 9-year-old Eric Moy.

Hansell was hospitalized but recovered, and has transferred to another Anchorage public school, Harriman said. Attempts to locate Hansell and his family for comment were unsuccessful.

The youngest of Thursday’s award winners was Christopher Duplessis of Mason Township, Maine. Duplessis was 14 and a course volunteer at the Gorham, N.H., racetrack when Edward C.W. Romney’s car went off the track, hit a tree and caught fire.

The driver was unconscious and secured by safety restraints when Christopher and his father ran to the scene where the car was almost fully engulfed in flames.

As Christopher’s father used a fire extinguisher against the flames, Christopher reached through the open door on the driver’s side of the car and pulled Romney free. Both Christopher and his father then dragged the driver farther away from the still burning race car. Romney required hospital treatment for second-degree burns to his right arm, right leg, and face, and other injuries.

Industrialist Andrew Carnegie started the hero fund in 1904 after being inspired by rescue stories from a mine disaster that killed 181 people.

The awards, bronze medals that come with $3,500 for the honorees or their survivors, are issued five times a year. Three of Thursday’s award winners died rescuing others.

The latest awards bring to 8,666 the number of people honored since the fund’s creation. More than $26.2 million has been given in one-time grants, scholarship aid, death benefits and continuing assistance.

On the Net: Carnegie Hero Fund Commission: http:///

www.carnegiehero.org