Students from across Sullivan County went to a different kind of school recently, where police, firefighters, and paramedics were their teachers.
23 high-schoolers, all 14 to 16 years old, spent the week with first responders at the county's third annual Emergency Services Youth Academy.
Alyssa McCloud, who said her father is second assistant chief at the Jeffersonville Fire Department, plans to join him when she turns 16.
"Yesterday, we did the canine stuff, and like bombs with the bomb squad," she said. They showed us a robot that they bring to get the bomb and bring it back, and they exploded it themselves the way that they want to, and not how they, how the people who said the bombs want to. And we got to meet the canine dog unit, and that was super fun."
Jake Zenas says cadets there can start at 16 years old and can learn a lot.
"They watch the rest of the firefighters work," Zenas said. "There are classes that they can also take. There's in-house training that they can take. As long as they show up to drills, work nights, and stuff like that, firefighters more than more than happy to show them anything they want to know."
15-year-old James Sherwood is already a cadet at the Livingston Manor Fire Department. He's not old enough to go out on calls, but he still helps out.
He said cadets even go to live fire sometimes as long as they stay at a safe distance.
"Well, like this one drill that we went on, we were doing a controlled burn of a condemned house, and we were just, of course, we aren't allowed to do anything,” Sherwood said. “So we had to watch from a safe distance, but we were still able to sit there and gain the experience of like watching how some things are handled.
Young people who want to join emergency services couldn't be doing so at a better time.
John D'Alessandro with the Fire Association of the State of New York says that 80% to 85% of fire and emergency response in New York State is done by volunteers, and he said it's getting harder to recruit young people.
D'Alessandro said that in the early 2000s, there were about 120,000 volunteers across the state. He estimates that there are around 80,000 today.
“That's because of a lot of different reasons,” he said. "You know, society has changed. People's attitudes have changed. Young people are much more mobile. You know, they leave their the communities they grew up in more often these days for a job or significant other or to go away to School, so so the challenge that we've been facing for the last 15 or so years is this sort of you know steady decline in the number of volunteers around the state."
D'Alessandro said it's an easier problem to identify than it is to fix. He said recent campaigns to get new members have worked to stop the decline, but the problem is acute in rural areas of New York.
Tony Carlucci is the captain of Bethel Emergency Medical Services. He works there full time, but says the rest of Bethel EMS is all volunteer. Carlucci said it's even harder for EMS to recruit because people are always getting sick, which leads to burnout for volunteers.
"It's a lot for a volunteer to to do, between responding from your house, getting your ambulance, a meeting on scene, assessing the patient, putting him in the ambulance, and then transporting whether to Harris or Orange, and then you have the offload time, and then you got to come back," Carlucci said. "A call could be two, three hours long, depending on where you're going."
Carlucci said they also struggle with retention, especially as more people move into the area. D'Alessandro said incentives like tax credits for volunteers have not increased in two decades.
Recent state legislation would raise the tax credits for volunteer firefighters and ambulance crews from $200 to $800, and awaits the governor's decision.
