SHIELD is a free outreach service for fire departments, EMS agencies, and police departments. We contact school districts, work through the approval process, and put your crew in front of students during the school day. We are not in the room when it happens, and any student who signs up signs up with you.
Recruiting outreach almost always lands on the training officer, who is also running drill night, tracking certifications, checking SCBA, and covering shifts. Emailing a school district and waiting three weeks for a reply is the first thing that falls off that list, and it falls off every year.
So we do it instead, in roughly this order.
Not the main office line. The assistant principal, career and technical coordinator, or health teacher with the authority to approve a visit.
Schools field a lot of outside requests. We handle the pitch, the paperwork, and the follow-ups until we get a real answer either way.
Not around the school's convenience. You tell us which days a crew can cover, and we build the visit inside that.
We ask the school about running it again, so a visit that went well becomes a standing one rather than a one-off.
Pick whichever fits what you have people for.
A visit during the school day
Lunch periods, career days, club fairs. Bring apparatus if you can. Military recruiters have run this play in cafeterias for decades.
A session in the CPR unit
Health classes already teach compressions. Your EMTs teach it alongside them, from experience rather than a textbook.
A student chapter in the building
Students who already joined tell their classmates about it between visits, which is how high schoolers actually find things out.
See all three in detailNo contract, no dues, no obligation to schedule a second visit if the first one was not worth your time. This is the whole commitment.
Cost
No fees, no dues, no invoice at any point. SHIELD is free to departments, schools, and students alike, and that is not an introductory rate.
Your time
Give us one person to coordinate with and the dates your crew can cover. Everything between those two things is ours.
The relationship
Students meet your people, ask your officers questions, and sign up with your department. We do not screen applicants or speak for you.
On our role: SHIELD is a scheduler. We are not a placement agency, we take no cut of anything, and we do not favor or officially link to individual departments. Once your crew is in the room with a student, we are out of the way.
A visit only turns into a roster addition if the student, and the parent driving them to the station, believe the answer to "isn't that dangerous?" is no. That work happens on our side, before your crew pulls up to the school.
How juniors stay outside the hazard zone, how EMS calls get screened before a youth member rides, and what supervision actually looks like at a scene.
Including the inconvenient parts, and that schoolwork comes first, so the students who turn up at your station have some idea what they signed up for.
Each student is pointed toward whichever department is nearest them, rather than steered toward any particular agency.
Three pages, in the order most people need them.
What you would actually do on a Tuesday night, what you can be certified in before 18, and an honest answer on the danger question.
ProgramsJunior firefighting, volunteer EMS, and cadet posts, compared side by side.
Find a DepartmentTell us your town and we will track down the closest one that takes junior members.
Your department, your town, what you are recruiting for, and roughly when a crew could cover a school visit. We will take it from there.