BY ED EMLEY
It’s 8 a.m., and the senior high school students have taken their seats. They listen to the morning’s announcements and class agenda for the day. Without warning, SCBA alarm bells start ringing like a bell choir throughout the Engine 343 firehouse. Their day in the high school fire technology program has begun; today’s lesson will be on using their SCBAs.
“The first thing you do every morning from your first day hired until the day you retire is check your SCBA!” I bark. I further emphasize, “This piece of equipment is one o the most important, if not the most important part of your gear. You must make sure it works! If it doesn’t, you die-period.”
The increasingly popular fire technology program, founded in August 2003, is based at the Butler Technology Career Development Center’s D. Russel Lee campus in Fairfield Township, Ohio, approximately 20 miles north of Cincinnati. This two-year program starts in the junior year with noncertificated courses in the fundamentals of firefighting and emergency medical services (EMS). The courses are less intense than those of the senior program, which follows a similar syllabus. The juniors are exposed to fire/EMS evolutions for the first time. The first year’s program allows students to get a feel of a firefighter’s responsibilities and functions and to consider whether they want to pursue a fire/EMS career. The overwhelming majority of juniors look forward to their senior year and eagerly await the start of school in August.
The senior course offers Ohio’s 240-hour Level 2 firefighter certification program and the National Registry Emergency Medical Technician-B certification program. The curriculum begins with fire operations at the start of the school year in late August to accommodate the water and other outdoor evolutions as the weather permits. The senior EMT course begins in mid-February, after the students sit for the state fire certification exam, and continues until the end of the regular school year in late May, when the state administers the EMT national certification test.
The basics of fire operations are stressed throughout the program so that students can function at an entry level in the fire service. They learn vital fire operations such as hoselays and proper hose reloading (photo 1), get a feel for the hose and nozzle, and practice salvage evolutions involving a simulated sprinkler system in which they learn how to create water chutes from salvage covers (photo 2) and get the feel of a Level A haz mat suit. In addition, they learn automobile firefighting in a real-life situation. Photo 3 shows the students in place and calling for water. In photo 4, they are participating in live-burn training.
 1. Photos courtesy of Butler Technology Career Development Center. |
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Basic rappelling techniques are taught during the knots and hitches chapter. Students begin rappelling from the ceiling of a multipurpose room on campus to gain confidence in the equipment (photo 5).
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In addition to working with the fire pumper, students also become familiar with a fully equipped ambulance and routinely are dispatched to on-campus “emergencies” during EMT training. The University of Cincinnati’s Air Care helicopter and crew visit the campus during our in-house mock disaster event at the end of the school year.
Moreover, on Wednesdays, students wear their Class A uniforms, which they also wear on field trips.
On completion of the program, students can be hired as firefighters and EMTs at the basic level. Graduates have gone on to join area fire departments as part-time firefighters. At graduation, the students have EMT certification, the prerequisite for entering paramedic programs. Paramedic training is also offered at Butler Tech as a post-secondary course. It is possible for a student to be eligible for a full-time firefighting career with all certifications, including paramedic, by the age of 19 or 20.
The firefighting lab makes up 2 1/2 hours of the student’s six-hour school day. The balance of the day is spent participating in full academic high school coursework on the campus. The juniors have the fire lab in the morning hours, the seniors in the afternoon. The students can receive college credits from area colleges through an articulation agreement. All students retain close ties with their home high schools through counselors and can participate in all extracurricular activities, such as sports, band, and homecoming, at the home high school.
The 13 years I served as an officer of Cincinnati (OH) Fire Department’s Squad 52 provided me with experience in heavy rescue, haz mat, extra-alarm fires, and technical rescues I use to supplement the textbook lessons with field experience.
The high school fire technology program at Butler Tech is unique in that much of the training is done in an academy setting that includes instruction in topics relevant also for students in the school’s criminal justice program. Coursework subjects such as protecting evidence, haz-mat awareness level, CPR, self-defense, and rappelling are presented to firefighting and criminal justice students in the same theater when responsibilities overlap. Students in these programs are instructed together in these topics to create awareness of responsibilities respective to each career. The intent is to foster greater collaboration between police and fire units in the future.
The fire service first learned in the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing that fire and police personnel need to work cooperatively to accomplish a common task; this issue also arose in New York City during and after 9/11. The Butler Tech secondary program is designed to build domestic preparedness officers through police/fire cooperation at a very early stage.
The first program graduates, the Class of 2004, originated the company designation “Engine 343” in memory of the Fire Department of New York firefighters killed on 9/11 (photo 6). The students have taken ownership of this building and apparatus as their own engine company and are very proud of this place.
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One of the first questions new students are asked is what the significance of the Engine 343 designation is for them. Few incoming students are aware of the association and its purpose in keeping the memory of those firefighters’ sacrifices alive.
With money earned through a recycling program it conducted, the Class of 2005 purchased a plaque for the firehouse articulating the reason for the Engine 343 designation.
The graduating class of 2006 purchased the sign above the door with the number designation, again with proceeds from recycling efforts. The graduating class of 2007 is already preparing to trump its predecessors with its legacy gift to Engine 343.
It is 10:25 a.m. The SCBAs are back in the lockers, the bunker gear is hung up. The straight and extension ladders, still dripping from the last evolution, are in their nestled place in storage. All of the hose is drained and replaced for the next response. The bell rings. The students scatter. Off to their next response? No. This time, it’s to their next classes, of course, reading and writing.
ED EMLEY retired from the Cincinnati (OH) Fire Department in 2001, after 26 years of service. He served the final 13 years as an officer with Squad 52, the department’s heavy rescue haz-mat unit. He is the developer of and lead instructor for the high school fire technology program at the Butler Technology Career Development Center.
