With students from of all five CUSD high schools and Clovis Online, the CUSD Fire Tech team took first place in the annual Career Skills Challenge firefighting event at the Clovis Fire Training Center on Thursday, Mar. 14.
“There is a first, second and third place given, and we were able to enter one team per high school. I entered a team from each high school and the group from Clovis High took home the gold this year,” Clovis East teacher and Fire Tech advisor Randal Finfrock and said. “The winners along with everyone else that competed worked really hard to get here and I know they are super proud and super happy for their accomplishments and I’m super happy for them too.”
Every year the Fresno County Office of Education sponsors the Career Skills Challenge, which is a series of tasks that pertain to different ROP Career Technical Education programs –– among them firefighting.
CUSD hosted the firefighting event at the Clovis Fire Training Center, where students took part in various tasks: knot tying, ladder-carrying events and other events that focused on manipulating skills, all relating to firefighting.
In total, there were 84 students and 21 teams from all around the Central Valley, including as far as Mariposa.
“They get to compete in the skills they are learning and experiencing. It is a competition, but it is centered around camaraderie. They are helping each other, and it was a real positive time,” Finfrock said.
As a former firefighter himself for over 30 years in the city of Clovis, Finfrock knows what it takes to become one of the pillars of the community.
“Firefighting is a team sport and if you look at firefighters doing their jobs, they work together. Everything they do as a team,” Frinfrock said.