What’s new at USFA’s National Fire Academy

Eriks is fine.

Thank you. Good to see you.

Yes.

Wow. It's changed a lot. So, I came here during the pandemic. We actually were not having any in-person training here on campus. And we were doing off-campus training as we could on a state-by-state basis with our state fire training partners, but we really had transitioned into a lot of online, virtual delivery.

So, thankfully we're in a much better place. The campus here in Emmitsburg, Maryland, back up full-speed ahead and adding classes, filling classes where we have empty seats, and the same is true with our state fire training partners.

So, what a lot of listeners may not know is that on an annual basis the National Fire Academy reaches about 90,000 students a year.

About 7,000 of those here are on campus and resident programs. You can go online, look at National Fire Academy admissions.

We moved to a quarterly enrollment system and apply for a class. If you're accepted to come to Emmitsburg, we'll reimburse you for your travel. So, there's no out-of-pocket expense for you other than you have to buy a meal ticket here on campus.

So, you'll get world class training with your peers from across the country. There's no cost for the class. We provide lodging. We'll pick you up at the airport. You buy a meal ticket. And, like I said, we'll reimburse you for your travel. But we're excited to be back at full steam here on campus.

And then, with our state fire training partners, that's a large delivery vehicle for us. 'Cause we know not all of our fire and EMS partners can get time off for a week or 2 weeks to come to Emmitsburg. We know staffing is what it is. We know travel is timely. And we reach about 25,000 students a year off campus through our state delivery system in partnership with our state fire training partners in every state. And then the largest amount of students that we reach is actually through our online delivery system, so NFA Online. We've got a dozen different classes that are available free of charge, so you can log in from your fire station, from your home and take an NFA class or you could take a partner class.

So, right now across the country, we have wildfires. We're mobilizing resources across state lines to help out our brothers and sisters. But we have a partnership with National Wildfire Coordinating Group. So, we actually host the online programs for S-130, S-190, L-180, which are those wildland interface firefighter.

We know how difficult it is for firefighters to get off duty to take training. The nice thing with our partnership with NWCG is career volunteer firefighters can take the wildland interface classes in their station or at home and finish up the classroom parts on the computer. And then what they have to do is finish the in-person hands-on portions at the fire department with their training staff. So, that's a cost savings for the fire department. That's a cost savings for the members and it's something we're pretty excited about.

So, we're continuing to stay in all 3 of those buckets. So, residence classes, obviously; state partnership classes; and then online, because we know there's something there for everybody. So, we're pretty excited about that.

So, what's new is — so let's start off with this year. This year is the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Fire Administration, so that's pretty exciting. For the history buffs, you can go back and remember a book you may have read called “America Burning” and there's been a couple of updates about that. But what's exciting for the NFA is that we've trained over 3.2 million people. So, when you look at the American fire service having approximately 1.2 million firefighters, career volunteer, of which we know about 70-plus percent are volunteer, 3.2 million students is amazing, but we also know there's a lot more work for us to do. So, we continue to develop new classes. So, we've got a number of new classes that are rolling out. We added a new class last year to our fire investigations program called “Fire as a Weapon.”

Sadly, what we've seen over the last few years is that fire is being used as a weapon against churches, government organizations, against other facilities. We're seeing fires started so that the firefighters can be lured in and then shot at. So, we want to make sure that our responders know how to appropriately respond to those incidents when they happen and manage those from an investigative standpoint.

We also have a great partnership with our wildfire partners, so U.S. Forest Service and CALFIRE, we’ve done a new partnership with them on what’s called FI-210, which is the fire investigator class for wildland firefighters. Wildland folks have access to that. Our structural partners don't, and a lot of communities across the country, as the listeners will know, that community may have an interface area that doesn't have a state or federal wildland agency to cover it. So, that's that local fire department's responsibility, so getting this training fills a gap because they're fire marshals, they're fire investigators now can be trained on how to look at what that cause and origin is when they arrive.

Switching gears, a new class that we're excited about that's rolling out is our “EMS Leadership” class. So, a 2-day class because we know that quite a bit of our workload is in that EMS area. Our staff developed a 2-day class called “EMS Leadership.” Pretty straight up as far as the title, and we're giving those supervisors, managers, leaders tools on how they lead their crew, how they lead their organization.

We've got really good feedback on that. Another one that's brand new is what we call “Belonging in the Fire Service.” So, across the country we've heard discussions about how does our fire department, our fire rescue agency, our fire EMS agency reflect the community we serve? And there's a lot of different vehicles about recruiting and how do we do outreach, but we also have to make sure internally that we have a fire department that it welcomes all and we all feel that they belong.

So, that's a new 2-day class that just came out. Really good feedback. We're excited about that. Some other classes are in development for command and control. We've got some other updates coming in the hazmat arena, and then also some new things happening in our community risk reduction. So again, our goal is to make sure that we have both current and relevant classes for those we serve and we continue to do that on a year-after-year basis.

Yeah, no — thanks, Teresa. And I'm pretty excited to co-chair the recruitment or retention work group, which as you mentioned comes out of the fire administrator summit.

So, the co-chair is Mary Cameli, the fire chief of Mesa, Arizona. Just an amazing individual with a passion for fire service excellence. So, we co-chair a group that is made up of career volunteer fire and EMS providers, even a former leader from Disney is part of our group. So, Ben May, some of the listeners may know because he has also served as a volunteer firefighter.

But what we're looking at is a recruitment or retention in the fire service today and into the future. And what we've done over the last year is realize that those are 2 separate discussions. Recruitment is getting people in; retention is how do we retain people. Over the course of our work group, we started off with some simple tasks and I'll walk through those, and then I'll tell you where we are today.

When we came in, the question was, what is out there as far as recruitment retention, what is working, what is needed? We found out working with our partners at the International Association of Fire Fighters, they're working with the U.S. Department of Labor to create a national apprenticeship program, much like we see in other trades. The work group is supporting their efforts. On the flip side, National Volunteer Fire Council is working with the U.S. Department of Education on something that we often call CTE, but it's Comprehensive Technical Education.

Think about the old term we used to use, vo-tech, bringing high school kids in to learn what it takes to be a firefighter, EMT, maybe even getting that training and education covered so when they graduate high school and are old enough, they could serve as a volunteer firefighter. So, that's been very successful.

Also, we've created a list of what we're calling best practices across the country. So, the departments that say, I just don't know where to look. I don't know where to go. We can answer that question by giving them departments that are successfully finding people. And we'll talk about that in a sec, but there are departments that are not struggling to find people while others are, and we'll talk a little bit about that.

But then the newest task that we received this year, one that we're pretty excited about, but a lot of our community members don't know what the fire department does. They don't know we're career, they don't know we're volunteer, they don't know we're combination. They don't know that a fire engine right now costs $1 million.

A ladder truck is probably a million 6. So, the costs have gone up, but we also need talented, qualified men and women to staff those vehicles. So, the idea coming out of the summit is to create a national campaign, what — much like the military has, which is a media campaign, letting our communities know what we do and how they can help.

So, that may be a career as a career firefighter, fire investigator, community risk reduction member. It may be a volunteer opportunity as a firefighter, a public education officer, public information officer and those kinds of things. A number of our partner national organizations have submitted Assistance to Firefighter Grant to create such a campaign.

That's not an easy task, as you know, with your work here in the communications branch, but there's a significant cost, but there's also significant time investment. The recruitment or retention work group is excited about the opportunity because that work group represents really a cross section of the American fire service, so not just career-volunteer combination, not just East Coast/West Coast, but we also have affinity partners.

Women in Fire as a member, Black Chief Officers Committee, National Native American Fire Chiefs, National Association of Hispanic Firefighters. All those different groups also see the benefits of recruitment or retention. We're waiting for good news to come out of the AFG review that grant has been funded and then we're ready to go.

And really what we see that to be is that springboard for the national discussion because not every community can afford a social media campaign or a media campaign or even get a TV commercial. But we see this as a way to get it going. Just like the military tells people, we need your help and here's how you do it.

So, we're excited about that opportunity.

Wow. So, we have collected dozens of best practices. Let's talk about some things that we take for granted. We take for granted that people know what we do. So, what we've seen across the country are communities that have established open houses or citizens' fire academies where we bring in folks from the community that they get to experience what the fire department does and what the fire department is.

We look at just 1 example, Tualatin Valley Fire and Rescue in Oregon. They do a citizens academy where they bring in people at nights and on weekends to experience what it's like to be a firefighter paramedic. We also look at the city of Los Angeles, which did a citywide open house in every fire station in the city of Los Angeles on the same day at the same time to basically get their neighbors to come in and say hi.

So, they could meet the firefighter paramedics, so they could see the equipment, they could talk about what the work is and then also recruit. We're seeing same opportunities in Polk County, Florida. And really fire departments in a lot of cases are so busy that their doors are closed, so people don't have the chance to go in and say, hi, what's going on?

Or, when you're out for a walk, bring the kid in and see the fire engine. But now we're creating these deliberate opportunities for that community engagement. So, not just open houses, but citizens academies. So, we get people in to understand what we do and then also a chance to recruit. So, that's 1 example of like kind of building that base about what does the fire rescue service do.

Other things that we're looking at is high school fire programs. So, we mentioned the National Volunteer Fire Council effort, but we have fire programs in places like Fairfax County; Evergreen Fire Rescue in Colorado; Rochester, Minnesota; all the way to Cobb County, Georgia; Sioux City, Iowa; and also Fairdale High School in Kentucky; and there's about a dozen more that we're aware of, but this is where high school students will actually go to class to learn about fire and EMS. So, they may come out with a Firefighter 1, they may come out with an EMT certification, and it gets them thinking about the career field that this is maybe something I want to pursue. That's 1 vehicle that we've captured, and all these we're going to obviously have on the USFA webpage under the summit, but then the next thing is what about youth and what else can we do if the high school is not the vehicle?

We look at youth-sponsored programs. So, junior firefighters, cadet firefighters and explorers. National Volunteer Fire Council has a junior firefighter program that is available to everybody. National Fallen Firefighters Foundation — they've hosted the high school fire and cadet symposium every year.

But then we look at operational programs. We can look at Waukegan, Illinois, where they have a cadet program. Hershey, Pennsylvania; Adelphi, New Jersey; Hauppauge, Long Island; El Paso, Texas; all the way to Broward County, Florida, where they actually have a County Explorer Committee.

So, what we look at here is — and some people have labeled these grow your own. Let's bring people into the fire department. We'll run the junior firefighter, the Explorer Program and let these youth realize what it's like to be a firefighter EMT and hopefully maybe one day they'll decide to do this as a career.

Those are just some examples. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, also has a Junior Fire Institute. And then one of the interesting one really focuses on diversity. But in Richmond, California, they run a program called Safari, which is solutions for at-risk youth. It's a way to bring inner city kids in with a structured program where they're learning not only life skills but also problem-solving skills, and they're learning how to be a firefighter EMT as part of that.

The goal there is to allow these youth to one day, maybe, become a firefighter EMT. Those are some examples from the high school kind of age. Then we move over to the college models where internships and associate degrees. If you look at internships, these are college related, to — some of them may be a summer hire, like a summer intern, a student intern. Some of these may be where you live at the fire station near the college. An example is right here in Emmitsburg where Vigilant Hose Company provides dormitories to students from Mount St. Mary's University that are volunteer firefighters.

They're able to stay in the fire station while they're going to school. And the exchange is that if there's a call, you get on the rig. So, that's an example. We have another one like that up in College Park, Maryland, next to the University of Maryland; Fairfax City; St. Michael's University up in Vermont; Oklahoma State.

So, there's many of those across the country we've identified. Also, an interesting one with internships is the U.S. Forest Service is working with the historically Black colleges and universities, so, the HBCUs, and they're using that outreach to find wildland firefighters.

So, schools that normally wouldn't think of opportunities as wildland firefighters, but Florida A&M, Southern University in Louisiana, Tuskegee University, Alabama A&M. So, those are just examples of internships, college-type programs where you can go to school, but then also get that experience.

Also, we talk about kids, and we're in the summer right now, so we're in the middle of August. But youth camps and girls’ camps: giving youth the opportunity to experience what a firefighter EMT does, but also the other things that happen. So, not everybody in the fire service has to pull a hose and wear an air pack, and not everybody wants to. So, these youth camps have been amazing.

Chief Hoover, deputy U.S. fire administrator, and I, we traveled over to West Virginia University. They had over 300 kids between the ages of 14-17 there for a week. They stayed at the 4H camp, but they were learning about firefighter EMT skills. So, things like Stop the Bleed, how to do CPR, how to use a fire extinguisher, but also a lot of team-building activities.

Those kids were from 12 different states. We look at the same thing. Portland, Oregon, has a girls’ camp that they offer. Orange County, California, has a program that they call Empowerment Camp. CALFIRE does Camp Cinder. Delaware State Firefighter School has a Camp Fury. So again, specific opportunities for youth — and in a lot of cases, easier for girls to realize that they can also be and have a place in the fire service.

Yeah.

Yeah, and then, we talk about girls, but what we've also seen is — and you mentioned Rachael, for Women in Fire — they're leaning into this heavily across the country; there's also programs specifically for women. And you look at — Dallas, Texas, calls it the Ladder Program.

San Antonio has something they call Hero Like Her. Women in Fire, we just mentioned, does a lot in Portland, Oregon, with the Port of Portland Fire Department in Hillsboro Fire. They're active in a regional effort called Girls Build. So, it's letting women see that there are places for them in the trades.

So, just some examples there. And then one of the things we talk about today is that how do we let people realize that this is not just going to fires and putting out fires or fire alarms and what people call that smells and bells. But there's also a lot of science and technology in here.

So, how do we embrace STEM — science, technology, engineering, math. Firefighters and paramedic EMTs deal with STEM every day, but we don't look at it that way from a recruiting tool. So, we're looking at places like the New York City Fire Department has a high school robotics club.

They actually take the drones, and they even have what look like dogs, but they are robotic dogs, and they bring those to the schools to get kids thinking about — this is pretty cool, I'd like to do that. We also look at Scappoose, Oregon. They've done STEM to take out to their cadet program.

And then our partners from UL Fire Service Research Institute have a wide variety of classes online, which they call Explore Labs. The science of fire forensics, the science of fire safety, thermal runaway, things that kids in school are reading about and maybe doing in a science class. But now, how do we connect that to the fire service?

And this is maybe something you could do because, who knows, maybe these young men and women one day will pursue their dream and become a fire protection engineer and are going to be working on addressing issues for the next technology coming out that has a problem and it requires a fire response.

And that's true, right? 'Cause if you look at — and the joke was for a while, and I'm dating myself, but when your VCR was blinking, you had your grandkid reprogram it.

Right? And now it's different. Now it's my iPhone is acting up. So, you give it to your grandkid, and you're right. The fire service is unique because no other industry, really, spans so many generations, because we're bringing in people as cadets at maybe 14. Maybe 18 to 21 so that they could be a member, but all the — up into their 60s and 70s, we still have folks responding, maybe not all the time to incidents when they get in those later years.

Yeah, they are being fire police, or they are doing administrative work. So, that way the younger bodies can respond on the calls while they're taking care of the paperwork and making sure the trucks are checked and the trucks are being repaired.

What I've always said is there's a thousand jobs for a thousand people.

Yeah.

We talk a lot about men and women that have served, and I know you've got a military background, so thank you. One of the things that we forget often is that those men and women have served our country, but a lot of them still want to continue to serve.

So, the Department of Defense has 2 amazing programs that we've identified. One of those allows them to get certification while they're getting ready to transition out of the military, so they can go online and do their training for their EMT certification exam. So, they can have that license when they're leaving the military and be out there in the market.

But the other thing that we look at is that GI Bill; it's so valuable. We have a number of fire academies now that allow veterans to take the Firefighter 1 programs. Connecticut, New Hampshire, Illinois fire academies are opening the doors to veterans saying, if you want to serve, we'll train you.

They don't have to pay. They'll use your GI Bill. But then when they complete that program, then they're certified and ready to go to work and you're getting snapped up by municipalities looking for people to serve. One of the things that is interesting with that is that what I often hear from veterans that I've worked with is that when they leave the service, they miss the structure and the camaraderie.

And we try to create that here at USFA. Obviously, we honor our veterans every day, but where better can you find structure and camaraderie than in the fire rescue service? So, that's out there.

Yes.

And they knew how to handle weapons and all those.

It is. Yeah, but people don't realize that they can use their GI Bill.

So, those programs, I mentioned Massachusetts is another one. Fairfax County, for example, they are taking advantage of something called SkillBridge which is a DOD program that helps veterans find careers. But they call it Hero to Hero under the SkillBridge program. Hilton Head Island; also Goffstown, New Hampshire; Ocean City, California; Dallas, Texas; are all part of SkillBridge.

So, these veterans have served, they go into SkillBridge program, and now they're learning their second career. And not only do we have people that are in great shape, right? Coming out of the military. We also have people that have served their nation and understand policy procedure, how to follow orders, but also how to engage and ask questions to make sure we're doing the right thing.

But the other part of that is that those veterans also have life skills. So, they've interacted with people. They know how to communicate with people in good times and in bads. They also know how to do things with their hands. They know how to change a tire. They know a plus/minus screwdriver, which we call a Phillips and a flathead.

They're not afraid to get dirty. So, they're used to doing that in the military. And then they understand from the fire rescue side that this is what I'm doing now. So again, just a great opportunity that we often don't think about as a vehicle for us, but a lot of these communities we've identified are actually taking advantage of that and bringing those veterans in to serve.

Yeah.

Yeah. The one thing I didn't mention, Teresa, and I think it's important, but we look at what else is out there for recruitment, and one of those is community college programs, university programs. Through a partnership, the National Fire Academy has here at USFA, we've got a partnership with 90 college universities through what we call Fire and Emergency Services and Higher Education.

These are 2-year programs, 4-year programs that teach fire and emergency services degrees, which at the associates level includes how to be a firefighter, how to be a fire inspector, how to be a fire instructor. So, we capture those on our webpage. But then switching gears, what we haven't talked about is retention.

So, we bring people in. How do we keep them? In a lot of communities, we've had to look differently at our policies and procedures. Some of those are things like tattoos, where some departments said, you're not going to work here if you have tattoos. We've come a long way in that, right.

We look differently at tattoos than we did, but in some departments that took a policy change. The other thing is shift schedules. Looking at how do we change schedules. There's a department now down in the South that is actually instead of starting at 8 in the morning and finishing at 8 in the morning, starting at noon and finishing at noon.

And the reason is that way their members will have a full sleep cycle and they won't be in the rush hour traffic with everybody else trying to get to work by 8. They could sleep at home, have breakfast, see their family and then show up to work at noon.

Exactly, yes. Yeah. Instead of you go home and you just want to go to sleep 'cause you have to go back to work. So, shift schedules is part of that. I think for the volunteer side, we'd really seen a very large change in the retention model. So, a lot of departments have created LOSAP programs, Length of Service Award Programs, recognizing people for their time.

We've seen communities lean in. Communities are paying for college education for their volunteers and even their career members. We have 401(k) programs for volunteers in a number of places, but our elected officials have leaned in. I'll use Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. They now give a tax credit if you're a volunteer firefighter for your property tax.

You look at Maryland, which is probably the most generous currently, but in Maryland, if you're an active volunteer firefighter for more than 3 years you get $7,000 tax credit right off of your income tax every year if you're an active member.

So again, that's not insignificant. They see that as a cost of doing business to keep those volunteer fire departments healthy, because they realize if they had a fully career department, it would cost a lot more. Maryland is an example. New York State has adopted legislation.

Delaware has done the tax credit. And there's about a dozen states that have followed that same path, which is how do we incentivize and recognize volunteer firefighters for what they're doing and we're willing to give them a tax break to have them be active. So, if there's an emergency, that we can have them go to that call.

We're also seeing that done on a local basis, different places. But then some other things that are creative and it ties into the pandemic. But we've never seen so many opportunities for telework as we have now. So, we have people selling insurance from their homes or in some business where they could work from home.

So, a lot of the volunteer fire departments have now changed their offices into hoteling opportunities for their volunteers. So, instead of sitting at home working on your documents, be at the fire station. So, if there's a call you can close out your sales call or close out your insurance review and get on the rig and cover the incident.

So, we're seeing that creativity, whether it's Spring Lake, New Jersey; Hershey, Pennsylvania. Volunteer fire departments have really leaned in and figured out how to do that. And then for the career side we're seeing some cities like Baltimore and Portland, Oregon, actually giving incentives to firefighters, career firefighters to live in a city.

And then we're seeing a lot of career departments do tuition assistance programs so that their members can continue their education while they're on the job. So, pursuing that associate's degree, that bachelor's degree and who knows, even a master's or a doctorate. Again, we've identified a lot of really good things happening, and while a lot of people just throw up their hands saying nobody wants to be here anymore, we've identified more than 5 dozen best practice departments that we’ll have on the webpage, and people can look it up and give those departments a call and say, hey, can you tell us more about your program? And maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but you'll at least bounce something off of somebody.

Yeah. And there's a lot of parallels between the military and the fire service. So, obviously we talked about the structure of the policy procedure. We have the organizational chain of command. We have the uniforms. But the other thing is that we really are very parallel in our recruiting.

So, a lot of people that have gone into the military have gone in because a family member went in. The same was true of the fire service. When you look at military recruiting, a lot of the branches of the military are not meeting their targets for what they need to recruit with 1 exception, which is the Marine Corps.

The Marine Corps has always advertised “The Few, The Proud,” and people have gravitated to that. And when a lot of the other branches lowered their standards, the Marine Corps actually raised their standards and had more people lining up.

So, as much as we talk about fire departments lowering their standards, that's not what people want. They want to be held accountable. They want to be told what to do. So, departments that are actually doing that are finding people to come join them. But again, that generational gap where maybe their mom, their dad, their uncle, their aunt wasn't a member.

There's nobody to say, I'm going to join the fire rescue department like you did. So, I think we'll work through that process just like the military is — but still where else can you help your neighbor as a volunteer and also career person —but where can you work in a career as a firefighter, paramedic EMT where you get paid every day to go help people and just have an amazing ride?

‘Cause you don't know from one day to another what the call is going to be.

It's great to be back with you. And thank you for having me.

Okay. We can do it.