To the congressmen and women that voted against, or not at all in the establishment of FFA, I would like to know your exact reasoning behind it.
ALL medical certifications are overseen by DOH, FFA just teaches them with permission from the Department of Health, as does every other certifying authority in the state (FHO, 9th, SCFD). Putting firefighting certifications under the supervision of the department of health is just fucking stupid, sorry.
SCFA failed because you were required to be employed within a primary department and meet departmental prerequisites before they can even apply to the division that SCFA applied to, being the “Training Division,” throughout SCFA (When I was in it under tow23er’s lead), the Training Division handled 3 things at the same time being;
The training of new recruits,
The training of departmental members on expanded fire/ems topics,
and the training of candidates (probationary SCFD employees) to get them above the standard required for their certification and allow them to work on their own.
SCFD as it stands now, cannot do that. SCFA cannot make a comeback, our department is minuscule (75 employees including probationary employees and command staff) compared to other departments with a training division of 18 members, with 10 of those members being command staff who have duties well beyond training division). With those training division members having to meet quotas already established where people are still struggling to this day to meet, a county-level academy, presumably wanted to be under SCFD, will not work. SCFD does not certify its own employees anymore because we simply do not have the manpower to do so, FFA has that manpower being a voluntary (well, not voluntary because not established) position, individuals who have the knowledge wont be locked to being in SCFD in order to train those who wish to be certified.
While in the beginning, FFA was established for the fire department, the needs of the State have grown and FFA is not responsible for just training the fire department anymore. It’s a simple fact, more people who have an FFA certification are not employed in and do not have intentions on being employed within SCFD and use their certifications elsewhere. The centralized academy is needed to set a standard, and to hold individuals to those standards, and the FFA standard is perfectly acceptable for all departments that accept a FFA certification for its employees.