Greenfield Fire Territory hosted its annual Teen Academy last week. The 21 participants got hands-on experience, including learning how to use equipment.
Photo courtesy Luke Eichholtz, GFT
GREENFIELD — The gear weighed nearly as much as the young man dressed head to toe in a real firefighter protective coat, pants and helmet. That’s the idea behind the week-long summer teen camp hosted by Greenfield Fire Territory (GFT) — to let area teenagers experience a little bit of what it’s like to be a firefighter.
The hope is some participants of a week-long Teen Academy, who get real hands-on experience, might fall in love with the profession and want to join the GFT Cadet high school program and then one day become a professional firefighter.
“Unfortunately, the numbers in the EMS/fire service are not going up, they’re going down,” GFT public information officer Luke Eichholtz said. “We’re excited because we’ve got a real big group of kids here. In-fact, it’s our largest camp we’ve ever done so far with 21 students here each day.”
The fourth annual wee- long Teen Academy was held last week at the city’s fire station on New Road. Students as young as the fifth grade through high school signed up to take part.
“Typically, we do mostly middle school aged kids, but we had some younger and some older express an interest so we thought, the more the merrier because you can build that interest,” Eichholtz said.
One of the students, Knute Mixon, a Greenfield-Central Intermediate School student, was smaller than most, but his enthusiasm for the program was sky high.
“It’s so fun being here and doing all this stuff,” Knute said. “We’ve been dressing and undressing with the fire gear like real firefighters, but my favorite part was spraying the hose and stuff like that.”
The students had a long list of “stuff” to learn about in a short week’s worth of work, which started with physical training and team building exercise. They followed that up with outfitting each student with real firefighter gear.
“Some of it doesn’t fit real well because it’s hard to outfit a fifth grader in real fire department gear designed for an adult,” Eichholtz said.
From there, the students learned the basics of firefighting, like how to handle a hose, moving hose lines and spraying water, searching for victims and pulling someone in trouble out of a bad situation.
“We had them do those super basic things, and we had eyes on them the whole time,” Eichholtz said.
The students also had to go through confidence building drills in their gear where they had to crawl through dark, tight places and learn how to maneuver in a tough situation.
“We did have one student tell us she never wanted to do that again while at the same time she was proud of herself for accomplishing the goal,” Eichholtz said.
Jasper Young, 14, Pendleton Heights Junior High School, was hit by a car when he was younger and suffered major injuries. He is healthy as can be now and was one of the participants who developed a great bond and respect for the firefighting service.
Jasper noted he one day hopes to be in the fire department business as an EMT.
“I’m doing this because I want to learn how to help others so they won’t be afraid of an injury or firefighters,” Jasper said. “I’ve liked everything about doing this. I don’t think anything has been too hard. I just know I really like the challenge.”
Other than exposing kids to the inside of the fire safety and protection business, the department’s other goal with the academy work was to help kids grow their confidence and maybe do something they never expected they would.
Maria Hernandez, a Greenfield-Central High School freshman, said the week-long academy has been eye-opening, particularly when she got stuck a couple of times in the dark training tunnel with her gear on, learning how to maneuver in fire gear.
“It was so skinny and dark,” Maria said.
Still, she’s said it’s been worth the hard work, and she hoped to walk out of the week’s academy with real lessons learned.
“We’re going to earn a certificate for some of the skills we learn here,” she said. “I might maybe do this because I do like helping people.”
Eichholtz noted the students had opportunities to learn real skills that might make a difference in their communities.
“We’re doing stop the bleed, and they’ll get a certification on that, and earlier we taught them life-saving CPR skills so they got that,” Eichholtz said. “That’s what I love about this program is these kids they’re learning skills that they could save a life tomorrow and that’s a big thing for us.”
