ROCHELLE — At the June 20 meeting of the Rochelle Kiwanis Golden K Club, Rochelle Fire Department Firefighter/Paramedic and Kishwaukee Education Consortium Fire Science/EMT Program Co-Coordinator and Lead Instructor Ben Johnson made a presentation on the KEC program he teaches at.

KEC is a trade school on the Kishwaukee College campus that caters to high school students in Rochelle, DeKalb, Sycamore, Genoa and Kirkland. Along with fire science and EMT education, KEC also caters to career programs such as welding, automotive technology, aviation and criminal justice. Students spend part of their day at KEC and almost all of the courses result in college credit.

In order to pass KEC's fire science class, students must have 220 class hours. For the EMT class, students must reach 150 hours of classes and do 24 hours of clinical time at OSF St. Anthony Medical Center. They must also do 16 hours of ride time on a working ambulance. EMT students can take the state certification exam once they're 18.

"We employ instructors who are still on the job," Johnson said. "We have people from large urban departments like Rockford, suburban departments like DeKalb and a large career rural department like Rochelle. The kids get a wide variety of different perspectives."

This year, KEC students will be utilizing the City of Rochelle and Ogle-Lee Fire Protection District's new fire training facility for a part of their coursework. The facility was erected in recent years to improve training access for local firefighters and to be utilized by a number of other organizations such as KEC and law enforcement.

"There we have the ability to do anything we need to do to train our students to the basic operations level," Johnson said. "I anticipate you'll see them in town at the fire training center quite a bit more this year."

EMT students attend a cadaver lab as part of their education and take a field trip to the OSF St. Anthony Medical Center trauma center.

Students pay $150 for the fire science class for college credit with a value of almost $6,000, Johnson said. The EMT college credit has a value of just under $3,000, and there is no course fee for that at KEC.

Johnson said in the last 5-7 years, the hiring pool for firefighter/paramedics has shifted from having more candidates than open positions to being "desperately short" on qualified candidates to fill positions.

"One reason is economic pressures and people being less likely to volunteer because they have to work two jobs," Johnson said. "And our call volume is through the roof because our median population is aging. The 65+ crowd is our number one user of services. Now the Baby Boomers generation is a larger percentage of the population. Naturally, our call volume is increasing."

Johnson said other reasons for higher call volumes include COVID-19 impacts on the healthcare system such as doctor's offices having less open appointments, causing people to use ambulances more for care.

The City of Rochelle is currently looking to add three more firefighters by 2026.

"The unfortunate issue is we're having a very hard time getting qualified candidates into the candidate pool to be able to hire," Johnson said. "And that's just locally. DeKalb needs to hire 30 firefighters to fill its new station and deal with attrition. Rockford is going to lose approximately 75 firefighters by the end of 2026 because of an early retirement buyout program they're doing. We're approaching desperate times in getting people involved. Career and technical education is proven to be successful in combating this."