Arvada’s Youth Fire Academy teaches youth fire safety

BY LILLIAN FUGLEI LFUGLEI@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM

Many children have dreams of becoming re ghters when they grow up. Arvada’s Youth Fire Academy helps them, at least partially, achieve that dream.

Each summer, Arvada Fire runs a three-day Youth Fire Academy for children ages 11-14. e academy focuses on giving kids a hands-on learning experience to educate them about re safety and the work re ghters do. “( e academy) really just kind of highlights the di erent things and programs that the re department has,” said Amber Jones, community risk reduction specialist at Arvada Fire. “If you want to be a re ghter, I think it’s a really good thing, but it’s more so activities that you can just use in everyday life.”

Each day of the academy focuses on a di erent theme. e rst day teaches participants about the daily life of a re ghter, through activities like gear stations, re truck tours, physical tness and even playing with a re hose. Other activities on the rst day focus on teaching the value of teamwork.

“We nd that important because, again, everything that we do for the re department is communication-based, it’s also teamworkbased,” Jones added. “So we have to be good communicators and we have to be good teammates and, and leaders as well.” e second day focuses on emergency medical services. Participants are taught CPR and basic rst aid, as well as stop the bleed techniques.

“We break them out into groups and they get to do teddy bear rst aid,” said Jones. “So they all get a teddy bear that they can learn how to do bleeding control on as if that teddy bear was a real person.” e last day of the academy in-

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