The Delaware State Fire School, in Dover, Delaware, specializes in training and educating about fire, rescue, and medical training, as well as providing summer camps for the community.
According to the Delaware State Fire School webpage, the school has the reputation of being the finest in the nation.
Vincent Miller, training administrator at the Delaware State Fire School, said that training is especially important for the fire skills and the amount of hazard involved in classes and real-world situations.
“The beginner classes give the basic building blocks for becoming a firefighter,” Miller said. “So we have our four core classes, which are basic firefighter skills.”
The school’s catalog includes information on each of the four classes: EMT training, CPR training, hazmat training, and the fire academy.
“We make sure that we have enough instructors to assure that someone is able to be a safety officer,” Miller said. “We have a safety officer for every time we train,”
Having safety officers is highly important to maintain a level of safety for classes like hazmat training, he said.
“We have our hazmat response skills, which actually are containing spills, working with and extinguishing fires with liquids and gases, as well as decontamination of hazardous materials personnel who went and took care of certain spills.” Miller said.
According to Miller, advanced classes expand on the skills learned from previous classes to the point where students start learning as leaders of crews.
In addition, the school seeks to teach the community about fire and emergency services by developing two camps for the youth.
“The Junior Fire Camp is for anyone aged about 13 to 17 who have any kind of interest in the fire department and becoming a volunteer,” Miller said. “Our staff goes through, and do kind of scaled down skills of our basic firefighter training and give them some exposure over three days to what they can expect if they come to fire school and become a firefighter.”
The school’s Facebook page gives a look into the activities and training that the kids do and also shows the all-girls camp.
“Camp Fury is solely for girls; the sixth to 12th grade age of young ladies,” Miller said. “Basically it's to give them a kind of clean environment where they can start working with each other, supporting each other.”
The schools summer camps are there to provide a safe learning experience for the youth to broaden their horizons and create friendships that become team working skills, Miller said.
According to the schools website, teamwork is extremely important in the firefighting field because of the physical and mental barriers that the job can hold.
“Teamwork is so important,” Miller said. “If we don't communicate as a team, the overall goal may not be met of putting out the fire, rescuing the person, treating the patient.”
The main goal of the school is to put confidence into the students so that they can be leaders in and out of the field, according to Miller.
“It's just very important for that communication and the teamwork and working together to achieve that same goal,” Miller said.