Walk up to a group of kindergartners and ask them what they want to be when they grow up. The odds are pretty good you’ll get at least one hopeful future firefighter or police officer.
So it was with great excitement several kindergarten classes from University Park Elementary School visited the Airport Fire and Police Department on Thursday.
The University Park students had the opportunity to tour the airport department’s new building and learn all about fire safety and what goes into the every day life of a police officer or firefighter.
The Airport Police and Fire Department just moved into its newly remodeled building in January.
Students visited in two groups Thursday. Michelle Claar and Karen Stockbridge took their two classes to the station in the afternoon.
Students were given a tour of the new building, during which officers showed the kids both the fascinating and the more mundane sides of the operation. They toured the weight room, for example, and took a brief visit to the kitchen, which the tour guides jokingly — or perhaps not so jokingly — called the most important room in the building.
“It keeps the whole thing running,” they told students.
In the kitchen, students learned that each shift gets its own refrigerator. In the dispatch center, students learned that a single dispatcher handles all of the department’s emergency calls during her 12 hour shift, not even leaving the dispatch room to grab a snack.
In the training room, students were taught how to stop, drop and roll and how to crawl under a smoke layer.
In the garage, kindergarteners had the chance to watch one of the firefighters do a hyper-quick change into his firefighting gear. By the time the firefighter was fully suited up, with his helmet and respirator, he would look and sound a bit like Darth Vader, the crew told students.