By Drew Zimmerman
The Pantagraph
BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — Katie Breazeale, a probationary crew member of the Bloomington Fire Department, said becoming a firefighter was not a lifelong dream.
But after hearing from another firefighter that the department was hiring and would not require paramedic licensure for new recruits, the former teacher and personal trainer from Gibson City seized the opportunity for a career change that fulfilled her interest in helping others.
“He originally told me about the Bloomington Fire Department openings for my husband,” Breazeale said. “And in talking about it to my husband, I said this is actually a better fit for me.”
With a child less than a year old at the time, Breazale said it would not have been possible to attend the necessary classes for licensure.
Carl Reeb, deputy chief of training for the Bloomington Fire Department, said applicant pools for vacant firefighter positions have typically sat at around 20 candidates in recent years.
One of the biggest barriers to recruitment was the need for applicants to have a state-issued paramedic license before being hired, he added.
“But then there wasn’t a guarantee that they were going to get on to a job,” Reeb said. “So they’ve just invested all this time and effort, and then there wasn’t necessarily a promise that they could even use that licensure.”
But after the Bloomington City Council agreed to lift this requirement and allowed new hires to complete the licensure process in-house, BFD began 2024 with an applicant pool of around 70 candidates.
Reeb said the department took on 12 new crew members from that pool and brought on another seven crew members last month. Although the new hires aren’t out on the streets yet, Reeb said these new classes bring the department to full staff.
“I can’t tell you the last time we (could) actually say we were at full staff,” he said.
One of these new recruits was Mark Pitzer, who had volunteered at fire departments in LeRoy and Heyworth but wasn’t sure if a full-time career was right for him.
“I didn’t know I wanted to do the medical side until I volunteered with LeRoy first and volunteered with Heyworth,” Pitzer said. “And they run a lot of assistance on their medical calls down there, so I started running a bunch of this and thought this is pretty cool, being able to help people.”
Before joining the department, Pitzer worked construction and said he would not have been able to get the time off to go back to school for a paramedic license if he wanted to make a career change.
Previous efforts by the city to increase recruitment have not been as successful.
Two years ago, the city code was amended to allow the fire department to hire certain categories of nurses and physician assistants. The council also expanded residency requirements to allow applicants to live anywhere in the state of Illinois.
However, these steps did not lead to a significant increase in the fire department’s hiring pool.
Reeb said the 12 new crew members hired in April have gone through academy training at the Illinois Fire Service Institute in Champaign. These individuals will then go through basic EMT training, which normally takes a couple of months.
“For a lot of these new hires, this is a chance to pursue a dream that they didn’t think they’d ever have the opportunity to because they’ve got established jobs, they’ve got other responsibilities, they’re married (or) they’ve got kids at home,” Reeb said. “And so for a number of them, they left other careers for a chance to pursue something that they didn’t think was an option for them.”
Breazeale said the assessment and treatment of patients was completely foreign to her when she first started.
“I do feel like every time you have a patient that you have to assess or treat, you do a little bit better at it,” Breazeale said. “That’s been new and different and definitely a learning experience for me, but I’m grateful to get to do it as an EMT for a few months before I transition into medic.”
BFD Captain Frank Friend said once the recruits’ EMT training is complete, they will be placed in fire stations for about six months to gain practical experience. Once that’s over, the year-long paramedic training process will begin for the first set of new recruits in May.
“There’s a lot of patience with us new guys and gals, and everybody seems pretty excited and willing to help us learn,” Pitzer said.
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