Firefighters in the city of Baltimore may need additional education to be promoted to top positions in the fire department.
The Baltimore Sun reports (http://bsun.md/Xi0yBT) that the move is part of a broader effort to impose professionalism in a department where tenure many times trumped education when it came to firefighter promotions.
The move will be staggered into three phases over the next seven years to give candidates time to complete training courses and pursue college credits. It means the fire department’s educational standards will be higher than that of the Baltimore police department, where officers are only required to pass a high school equivalency test.
Local fire union leaders criticized some of the new standards as being unattainable, such as the requirement that a battalion chief hold an associate’s degree and a deputy chief hold a bachelor’s.
Read more about it at http://bsun.md/Xi0yBT.
