By Rick Markley

A top-notch first responder training facility needs more than land, buildings, and instructors—it needs gear. Here’s how one new site stocked up and its plan for growth.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever been part of a firefighter training class where a large group of students stood around waiting their turn while two or three firefighter students did a hands-on evolution. If your hand’s not up and you’ve been at this profession for a while, consider yourself lucky.

1 The Multi Agency Academic Cooperative is a newly opened center about 50 miles east of Chicago, Illinois, that is operated by a nonprofit foundation and was built and supplied through a private-public partnership. (Photos by Tim Olk.)

Instructors know that this standing-around scenario is one of the quickest ways to lose students’ interest, and once lost, it is difficult to regain. Getting around that problem is just one of the challenges facing any new first responder training facility.

The New Training Facility

The Multi Agency Academic Cooperative is one such training facility wrestling with that problem. The MAAC, as it’s called, is a newly opened center about 50 miles east of Chicago, Illinois, that is operated by a nonprofit foundation and was built and supplied through a private-public partnership. You can read the full story of how the MAAC came to be and what it offers first responders at http://bit.ly/2ikLvKx.

Leaders at the MAAC understand full well that solving the standing-around dilemma is a matter of having a sound organizational structure, the proper instructor-to-student ratios, and enough equipment to keep firefighters working. “When we have a [Firefighter I and II] class of 42 starting, I don’t want four of them working on a ladder and 38 of them sitting around,” says Michael Parks, division chief for the Crown Point (IN) Fire Department. “We want to get it to where we have [enough] ladders where they can break up into squads of four and operate as a company. We’re going to have to have a lot of duplication of equipment so we can get more hands on.”

Parks is Indiana’s District 1 firefighter training coordinator. Indiana is divided into 10 fire training districts. The five-county District 1 is the second largest by population in the state with about 2,000 firefighters from more than 70 departments. Parks has also been on the ground floor of the MAAC’s development and sits on its leadership committee. That involvement goes hand-in-hand with District 1’s contract to use the MAAC as its home base. “We are the second most populated district in the state, but District 1 does far more training than other districts,” Parks says. “We put a lot of training together up here.

Designed for Multiple Evolutions at Once

From an engineering and design standpoint, the MAAC is laid out in such a way as to allow for Parks’ vision of multiple squads of firefighting students training at once. That comes, thanks in large part, to MAAC Academy Director Ward Barnett. He led