Published in Interface Tech News
AUGUSTA, Maine ‹ Responding to rapid growth in demand for its services and projected expansion in the future, Capitol Computers is expanding its training space from 30 to 50 workstations and hiring two additional instructors.
The company will continue to provide sales, maintenance, and technical support to businesses and educational institutions, but sees the most growth potential in the area of computer-based training, according to vice president and general manager Paul DeSchamp.
DeSchamp said the company's revenue increased 18 percent from 2000 to 2001, and projected it will increase a further 40 percent by 2002. Those figures are driven by a 200 percent increase in offerings of career-based, self-paced training classes from 2000 to 2001. DeSchamp expects the class offerings will double again in the next year.
Capitol's biggest client is the state of Maine, to which it offers employee training and serves the state's career counseling program, retraining workers laid off from other industries. Among the services Capitol offers are certification programs for computer technicians and network engineers.
The new space, with 20 additional desktop machines, all with high-speed Internet connections and access to networked printers and file servers, is scheduled to open Dec. 1. DeSchamp added that there is more room for expansion, should it be needed.
He admits that mill closings and other layoffs around Maine have boosted his business, but stressed that, while he is happy to help people learn new skills, "we don't want to see more closings."
Katherine Jones of the Boston-based Aberdeen Group's education and e-learning research section said that, while computer-based training is nothing new, computers are being used more and more for educational purposes.
In the current economic slowdown, Jones said, people need to retrain or improve their skill sets to get and keep jobs ‹ that means more business for training centers. Added to that can be state or even company programs offering financial incentives to laid-off workers learning new skills.
According to Jones, one area of significant promise is certification for industrial workers. There are programs which train people to handle hazardous material, operate heavy equipment, or perform other tasks, offering certifications at the end of the process.
"You need about five of them to run a backhoe," Jones said. And the certifications expire, bringing people back every year or two to keep current. "Most of the stuff is learnable online and testable online," she said. "That's a perfect thing for training companies."
Friday, December 7, 2001
Thursday, December 6, 2001
Remember Christmas in Thailand
Published in the Current
In Thailand, Christmas isn’t the national holiday it is here in the U.S. In the mostly Buddhist country, only a small percentage of people are Christians. But the Rev. Phil Gage said the country is increasingly embracing the commercial aspects of the holiday.
“You hear Christmas carols, you see Christmas lights,” on the streets of the major cities, he said. Part of that is because the king’s birthday is Dec. 5, and that is a cause for great national celebration.
Christmas, he said, “sort of fits right into that.”
Gage, now the pastor of Scarborough’s Free Baptist Church at Eight Corners, and his wife spent 25 years as missionaries in Thailand.
They were there for four years at a stretch before returning home to the U.S. for a year of traveling to speak at various churches.
They served as spiritual advisers to villagers, city-dwellers and other missionaries, and helped make Christmas a special time.
“Here we’d normally gather as families,” Gage said. In Thailand, “people come together and celebrate as a church family.”
Many Christians in Thailand are not estranged from their Buddhist families, Gage said, but they have big church community events to celebrate the holiday.
There are pageants, caroling and worship. And while Christians make up less than five percent of the population of Thailand, they travel to the houses of church members, singing and having fun at each home. One year, Gage said, they took two minivans and started caroling at 10 p.m. They finished the next morning at 5 a.m., when they ate a giant meal of boiled rice with all sorts of side dishes, a favorite Thai meal.
The Thais don’t tend to exchange gifts, but they will give each other cards, Gage said. And decorations aren’t the same as we would expect. “It is more apt to be the traditional sort of decoration,” Gage said.
In his time in Thailand, Gage traveled all over the country. Some tribal groups, he said, have converted to Christianity en masse, but in a way that has allowed them to retain tribal customs.
Before they became Christian, they would hold large parties for each new year, but would get drunk and fights would erupt.
After they became Christian, they stopped having the celebrations for a time, but realized they missed dressing up in traditional costumes and doing their dances and other cultural performances. So they decided to have their traditional celebrations but substituted tea for the alcohol, making the events more peaceable.
Thais, he said, tend to focus more on people and relationships than on material objects the way Americans do, especially around the holidays, but Gage has also seen parallels between Thai Christmas celebrations and the way his church members observe the occasion.
“(Thais) will act out the birth of Christ a lot,” he said. Recently some of the members of his church wanted to do a live nativity scene outside the church. “That really clicked with me,” Gage said.
But Thais also will bring their own culture to church. “They would perform their cultural dances,” he said, as well as songs.
Like in the U.S., Thai holiday church services often feature children performing.
Gage and his wife adopted two Thai children, who are now 30 and 25. Gage became a grandfather for the fourth time Nov. 30, when his daughter gave birth to his first granddaughter in Massachusetts.
His daughter, Missy, makes crèches for the holidays, including a special Maine themed one, with a fisherman and woodsman, among other figures. She also makes crèches or ornaments that she gives to each family in Gage’s church during Advent.
And now, back in the states, Gage has an easier time decorating his home and the church as well. Over there, he said, “you had to really be creative in terms of decorating.”
But even so, lights and candles were common, and through the 1980s more and more Christmas decorations came to Thailand, appearing in storefronts and advertisements, primarily in cities around the Buddhist nation.
In Thailand, Christmas isn’t the national holiday it is here in the U.S. In the mostly Buddhist country, only a small percentage of people are Christians. But the Rev. Phil Gage said the country is increasingly embracing the commercial aspects of the holiday.
“You hear Christmas carols, you see Christmas lights,” on the streets of the major cities, he said. Part of that is because the king’s birthday is Dec. 5, and that is a cause for great national celebration.
Christmas, he said, “sort of fits right into that.”
Gage, now the pastor of Scarborough’s Free Baptist Church at Eight Corners, and his wife spent 25 years as missionaries in Thailand.
They were there for four years at a stretch before returning home to the U.S. for a year of traveling to speak at various churches.
They served as spiritual advisers to villagers, city-dwellers and other missionaries, and helped make Christmas a special time.
“Here we’d normally gather as families,” Gage said. In Thailand, “people come together and celebrate as a church family.”
Many Christians in Thailand are not estranged from their Buddhist families, Gage said, but they have big church community events to celebrate the holiday.
There are pageants, caroling and worship. And while Christians make up less than five percent of the population of Thailand, they travel to the houses of church members, singing and having fun at each home. One year, Gage said, they took two minivans and started caroling at 10 p.m. They finished the next morning at 5 a.m., when they ate a giant meal of boiled rice with all sorts of side dishes, a favorite Thai meal.
The Thais don’t tend to exchange gifts, but they will give each other cards, Gage said. And decorations aren’t the same as we would expect. “It is more apt to be the traditional sort of decoration,” Gage said.
In his time in Thailand, Gage traveled all over the country. Some tribal groups, he said, have converted to Christianity en masse, but in a way that has allowed them to retain tribal customs.
Before they became Christian, they would hold large parties for each new year, but would get drunk and fights would erupt.
After they became Christian, they stopped having the celebrations for a time, but realized they missed dressing up in traditional costumes and doing their dances and other cultural performances. So they decided to have their traditional celebrations but substituted tea for the alcohol, making the events more peaceable.
Thais, he said, tend to focus more on people and relationships than on material objects the way Americans do, especially around the holidays, but Gage has also seen parallels between Thai Christmas celebrations and the way his church members observe the occasion.
“(Thais) will act out the birth of Christ a lot,” he said. Recently some of the members of his church wanted to do a live nativity scene outside the church. “That really clicked with me,” Gage said.
But Thais also will bring their own culture to church. “They would perform their cultural dances,” he said, as well as songs.
Like in the U.S., Thai holiday church services often feature children performing.
Gage and his wife adopted two Thai children, who are now 30 and 25. Gage became a grandfather for the fourth time Nov. 30, when his daughter gave birth to his first granddaughter in Massachusetts.
His daughter, Missy, makes crèches for the holidays, including a special Maine themed one, with a fisherman and woodsman, among other figures. She also makes crèches or ornaments that she gives to each family in Gage’s church during Advent.
And now, back in the states, Gage has an easier time decorating his home and the church as well. Over there, he said, “you had to really be creative in terms of decorating.”
But even so, lights and candles were common, and through the 1980s more and more Christmas decorations came to Thailand, appearing in storefronts and advertisements, primarily in cities around the Buddhist nation.
Mainers remember Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941
Published in the Current
Infantryman Albert Riopel
Albert Riopel, 84, spends most of his days in the Maine Veterans Home on Rt. 1 in Scarborough. And though he is in the company of a great many veterans of World War II, he hasn’t found anyone else who was at Pearl Harbor the day the Japanese attacked.
He volunteered for the infantry in 1940 and after training he went to Pearl Harbor, to prepare for an attack on Japanese positions on Corregidor, an island stronghold in the Pacific.
Preparations were under way as negotiations deteriorated between the Japanese and U.S. governments, and war appeared more probable. But nobody expected the attack that peaceful Sunday morning, Dec. 7, 1941.
He was just getting up when the attack began.
“It was a fiasco. (The Japanese) knew what they were doing,” Riopel said. They bombed the harbor, the barracks and the airfield, destroying much of the military hardware in Hawaii.
Riopel’s unit was sent to Clark Field to defend it from attack.
Everyone expected the Japanese to land and try to take the island, and Riopel thinks they might have succeeded. But they didn’t try.
“They wanted to cripple the Navy,” he said. “It was over in no time at all.”
After the attack, the invasion force, including Riopel, headed for Corregidor, but found it surrounded by enemy submarines.
So they invaded New Guinea instead. Fighting in the jungle was merciless, he said, and difficult because of the thick underbrush.
The Japanese would hide all over the place and attack from any direction, Riopel said.
“Every time we’d go on patrol the first one (in line) would get killed—the first one and the last one,” Riopel said.
He doesn’t like to remember the scenes he saw, but did say he watched many of his friends die over the four years he spent fighting in the jungle.
“It was rough,” Riopel said. “I lost a lot of my friends there.”
He said fighting in the Pacific was brutal. “Many times I wished I was in Europe,” he said, where soldiers would capture a city and then celebrate.
Riopel especially envied the access to wine the European soldiers had.
But in the Pacific things were different.
“You capture one island and you go on to the next,” he said.
Even worse, General MacArthur wouldn’t let his unit go back to the U.S. “He wouldn’t let us leave because we had experience,” Riopel said.
He especially respected the Australian soldiers, whom he described as tough and skilled fighters, though they would stop for tea twice a day, he said, “no matter where they were.”
He wasn’t a career soldier, and after the war ended he came to Maine and worked in mills for more than 40 years. He lived in Westbrook and two weeks ago sold the house he owned in that town for over 55 years.
His daughter lives in Cape Elizabeth, and he gets a lot of visits from his family, but when he sits alone sometimes, he said, memories of what he saw in the war come flooding back.
Nurse Revella Guest
Revella Guest was born Nov. 8, 1912, in Brownville Junction to a Canadian mother and an English father. She went to high school in the town, and then went to Portland to study nursing at Maine General Hospital, graduating in 1935.
Her papers, now in the care of a relative in Scarborough, tell the story of her life, including her experience as a nurse at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
Restless with private duty work around Portland, she became an Army nurse on Jan. 30, 1930. By March of 1941 she was heading to Tripler Army Hospital near Honolulu, the capital of the then-territory of Hawaii. She was lodged at Hickam Field, which would suffer serious damage in the Dec. 7 attack. On Dec. 5, though, the nurses were moved from their four-person apartments back to rooms at Tripler.
That night, she and some of her nursing friends went to dinner on the battleship USS West Virginia with some warrant officers serving
on that ship.
As they ate and watched a movie, it never crossed their minds that Japan could attack. “Everybody was just having a good time and doing their duty. We never thought anything about that,” Guest said.
On Dec. 7, just like the day before, she was scheduled for the morning shift.
The attack
At 7 a.m., Dec. 7, she reported for work at the hospital, and was doing routine work on the ward, when it happened.
“All of a sudden the radio started blaring for all military people to report back to their stations. We had porches and I was out looking on the back porch, and I saw some, heard some guns, and I saw black smoke coming up. I thought, ‘My goodness! I’ve never seen that before!’” she said.
“Then the radio started to blare that we were being attacked by the Japanese. Then I called down to my friends where they were, and I told them to get up and get dressed because everybody was going to be working, because we were being attacked by the Japanese,” Guest said.
The hospital had fewer staff on duty over the weekend, with some people having time off and even some patients out on a pass. But she knew it would be a busy day.
“We knew that when we were being attacked that we were going to have casualties because we were the largest general hospital on the island. In fact, we were the only general hospital,” she said.
She spent the first few minutes getting the walking wounded out of the hospital to make room for more seriously injured people. When she was done, only two patients remained, both of whom were in traction, but they were not about to let that stop them.
“I had to watch those guys like a hawk,” she said, “because they were going to cut themselves out of traction and go to war.”
Her ward became a post-operation ward, where patients went after surgery. “You had amputees, abdominal wounds, head injuries. You name it, and it was there,” Guest said.
She and one other nurse were racing around caring for 65 patients, changing intravenous fluids and providing other care to the men, as
they came out from under anaesthesia. They didn’t have time to do proper charts, but instead scribbled the time of the last morphine injection a patient received on a scrap of paper at the head of each bed.
As night fell, the hospital was blacked out to protect against air raids. She needed to give a shot to a patient on the porch, and removed the piece of blue carbon paper from the front of the flashlight, so she could see the vein. “I’d take that thing off and some guard would holler, ‘Put out that light or I’ll shoot!’ I’d yell, ‘Shut up until I give this shot!’” she laughed.
She worked through the whole night and into the next day without any sleep. She was first able to change into a clean uniform at 6 a.m. Dec. 8.
A few days after the attack, she and a friend went to the local telegraph office to deliver their first news to their families that they were OK. Her telegram just said, “Revella.”
The first shipload of patients headed back to the mainland on Christmas Day, after Guest and her colleagues spent a lot of time Christmas Eve bandaging patients to be ready for travel.
Still tied to Maine
Her family remembers her as having loved Maine and returning as often as possible.
Her papers and other effects were distributed among the family. Many of her World War II records and items are now with her sister-inlaw’s
cousin, Ken Dolloff of Scarborough.
Infantryman Albert Riopel
Albert Riopel, 84, spends most of his days in the Maine Veterans Home on Rt. 1 in Scarborough. And though he is in the company of a great many veterans of World War II, he hasn’t found anyone else who was at Pearl Harbor the day the Japanese attacked.
He volunteered for the infantry in 1940 and after training he went to Pearl Harbor, to prepare for an attack on Japanese positions on Corregidor, an island stronghold in the Pacific.
Preparations were under way as negotiations deteriorated between the Japanese and U.S. governments, and war appeared more probable. But nobody expected the attack that peaceful Sunday morning, Dec. 7, 1941.
He was just getting up when the attack began.
“It was a fiasco. (The Japanese) knew what they were doing,” Riopel said. They bombed the harbor, the barracks and the airfield, destroying much of the military hardware in Hawaii.
Riopel’s unit was sent to Clark Field to defend it from attack.
Everyone expected the Japanese to land and try to take the island, and Riopel thinks they might have succeeded. But they didn’t try.
“They wanted to cripple the Navy,” he said. “It was over in no time at all.”
After the attack, the invasion force, including Riopel, headed for Corregidor, but found it surrounded by enemy submarines.
So they invaded New Guinea instead. Fighting in the jungle was merciless, he said, and difficult because of the thick underbrush.
The Japanese would hide all over the place and attack from any direction, Riopel said.
“Every time we’d go on patrol the first one (in line) would get killed—the first one and the last one,” Riopel said.
He doesn’t like to remember the scenes he saw, but did say he watched many of his friends die over the four years he spent fighting in the jungle.
“It was rough,” Riopel said. “I lost a lot of my friends there.”
He said fighting in the Pacific was brutal. “Many times I wished I was in Europe,” he said, where soldiers would capture a city and then celebrate.
Riopel especially envied the access to wine the European soldiers had.
But in the Pacific things were different.
“You capture one island and you go on to the next,” he said.
Even worse, General MacArthur wouldn’t let his unit go back to the U.S. “He wouldn’t let us leave because we had experience,” Riopel said.
He especially respected the Australian soldiers, whom he described as tough and skilled fighters, though they would stop for tea twice a day, he said, “no matter where they were.”
He wasn’t a career soldier, and after the war ended he came to Maine and worked in mills for more than 40 years. He lived in Westbrook and two weeks ago sold the house he owned in that town for over 55 years.
His daughter lives in Cape Elizabeth, and he gets a lot of visits from his family, but when he sits alone sometimes, he said, memories of what he saw in the war come flooding back.
Nurse Revella Guest
Revella Guest was born Nov. 8, 1912, in Brownville Junction to a Canadian mother and an English father. She went to high school in the town, and then went to Portland to study nursing at Maine General Hospital, graduating in 1935.
Her papers, now in the care of a relative in Scarborough, tell the story of her life, including her experience as a nurse at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
Restless with private duty work around Portland, she became an Army nurse on Jan. 30, 1930. By March of 1941 she was heading to Tripler Army Hospital near Honolulu, the capital of the then-territory of Hawaii. She was lodged at Hickam Field, which would suffer serious damage in the Dec. 7 attack. On Dec. 5, though, the nurses were moved from their four-person apartments back to rooms at Tripler.
That night, she and some of her nursing friends went to dinner on the battleship USS West Virginia with some warrant officers serving
on that ship.
As they ate and watched a movie, it never crossed their minds that Japan could attack. “Everybody was just having a good time and doing their duty. We never thought anything about that,” Guest said.
On Dec. 7, just like the day before, she was scheduled for the morning shift.
The attack
At 7 a.m., Dec. 7, she reported for work at the hospital, and was doing routine work on the ward, when it happened.
“All of a sudden the radio started blaring for all military people to report back to their stations. We had porches and I was out looking on the back porch, and I saw some, heard some guns, and I saw black smoke coming up. I thought, ‘My goodness! I’ve never seen that before!’” she said.
“Then the radio started to blare that we were being attacked by the Japanese. Then I called down to my friends where they were, and I told them to get up and get dressed because everybody was going to be working, because we were being attacked by the Japanese,” Guest said.
The hospital had fewer staff on duty over the weekend, with some people having time off and even some patients out on a pass. But she knew it would be a busy day.
“We knew that when we were being attacked that we were going to have casualties because we were the largest general hospital on the island. In fact, we were the only general hospital,” she said.
She spent the first few minutes getting the walking wounded out of the hospital to make room for more seriously injured people. When she was done, only two patients remained, both of whom were in traction, but they were not about to let that stop them.
“I had to watch those guys like a hawk,” she said, “because they were going to cut themselves out of traction and go to war.”
Her ward became a post-operation ward, where patients went after surgery. “You had amputees, abdominal wounds, head injuries. You name it, and it was there,” Guest said.
She and one other nurse were racing around caring for 65 patients, changing intravenous fluids and providing other care to the men, as
they came out from under anaesthesia. They didn’t have time to do proper charts, but instead scribbled the time of the last morphine injection a patient received on a scrap of paper at the head of each bed.
As night fell, the hospital was blacked out to protect against air raids. She needed to give a shot to a patient on the porch, and removed the piece of blue carbon paper from the front of the flashlight, so she could see the vein. “I’d take that thing off and some guard would holler, ‘Put out that light or I’ll shoot!’ I’d yell, ‘Shut up until I give this shot!’” she laughed.
She worked through the whole night and into the next day without any sleep. She was first able to change into a clean uniform at 6 a.m. Dec. 8.
A few days after the attack, she and a friend went to the local telegraph office to deliver their first news to their families that they were OK. Her telegram just said, “Revella.”
The first shipload of patients headed back to the mainland on Christmas Day, after Guest and her colleagues spent a lot of time Christmas Eve bandaging patients to be ready for travel.
Still tied to Maine
Her family remembers her as having loved Maine and returning as often as possible.
Her papers and other effects were distributed among the family. Many of her World War II records and items are now with her sister-inlaw’s
cousin, Ken Dolloff of Scarborough.
Moose on the loose in Cape
Published in the Current
School bus drivers and neighbors have spotted two moose wandering around in the Great Pond area of Fowler Road, often in the early morning.
Out of concern for the well being of the animals and the safety of drivers on the road, the Cape Elizabeth Police Department asked a wildlife biologist from the state to take a look at the area and help determine whether the moose should be tranquilized and relocated or left alone.
The biologist visited Fowler Road Tuesday afternoon, and didn’t see the moose, one of which is reportedly smaller than the other. But he did make a recommendation to Police Chief Neil Williams about what to do.
“His feeling is that they’re going to move on,” Williams said. With the warm weather and the apples on the ground nearby, they have food for the moment. But when it cools off, and when the snow comes, Williams said, “they’ll move on with the supply of food.”
The police will continue to keep an eye on the area, and have ordered signs be put up warning drivers to watch out for moose.
If the moose are a mother and a calf born in the spring, the little one could weigh as much as 400 pounds. The mother would weigh between 700 and 900 pounds, and could stand as much as six feet tall at the shoulder.
Moose are especially dangerous to drivers because their coats are dark and their eyes are higher than most headlight beams, so drivers don’t see their reflections the way they do with deer or other smaller animals.
Also, moose tend to be active between dusk and dawn, when visibility is lowest. And they can be unpredictable, sometimes darting out in front of an oncoming car.
For now, Cape’s moose will have a temporary home, but will move where nature supplies the food.
“They should be up north, but they’re not,” Williams said.
School bus drivers and neighbors have spotted two moose wandering around in the Great Pond area of Fowler Road, often in the early morning.
Out of concern for the well being of the animals and the safety of drivers on the road, the Cape Elizabeth Police Department asked a wildlife biologist from the state to take a look at the area and help determine whether the moose should be tranquilized and relocated or left alone.
The biologist visited Fowler Road Tuesday afternoon, and didn’t see the moose, one of which is reportedly smaller than the other. But he did make a recommendation to Police Chief Neil Williams about what to do.
“His feeling is that they’re going to move on,” Williams said. With the warm weather and the apples on the ground nearby, they have food for the moment. But when it cools off, and when the snow comes, Williams said, “they’ll move on with the supply of food.”
The police will continue to keep an eye on the area, and have ordered signs be put up warning drivers to watch out for moose.
If the moose are a mother and a calf born in the spring, the little one could weigh as much as 400 pounds. The mother would weigh between 700 and 900 pounds, and could stand as much as six feet tall at the shoulder.
Moose are especially dangerous to drivers because their coats are dark and their eyes are higher than most headlight beams, so drivers don’t see their reflections the way they do with deer or other smaller animals.
Also, moose tend to be active between dusk and dawn, when visibility is lowest. And they can be unpredictable, sometimes darting out in front of an oncoming car.
For now, Cape’s moose will have a temporary home, but will move where nature supplies the food.
“They should be up north, but they’re not,” Williams said.
Students hear the call for fire and rescue work
Published in the Current
While their friends and classmates are playing sports, hanging out with friends or doing homework, some high school students in Scarborough and Cape Elizabeth would rather be out fighting fires, directing traffic or administering medical care to sick and injured people in their communities.
They learn skills they will use as police officers, firefighters and emergency medical personnel, and they begin serving their communities from a young age.
It is a crucial opportunity, according to Cape Elizabeth Fire Chief Philip McGouldrick, who got his start as a firefighter in South Portland’s student program 40 years ago.
“You get them when they’ve got some time and interest,” McGouldrick said, and before they go away to college and lose interest or no longer have the time to learn firefighting skills.
It offers another benefit to the towns, both of which are home to commuting workers. Fire and rescue volunteers are in shorter supply during the day, but the departments are bolstered by the students, who are nearly always around during school hours.
The students all must qualify for their extracurricular activities in the same way as student athletes do, by keeping grades up and by being responsible for any class work missed.
Going since the 1960s
The oldest program in the two towns is Scarborough’s student rescue squad, begun in 1968.
The program now involves seven or eight members each of the junior and senior classes at the high school.
They have weekly training sessions, in which juniors prepare for the Emergency Medical Technician training course mandated by the U.S. Department of Transportation. They learn basic first aid, CPR and how to splint broken bones. Seniors, who have taken the EMT course at Southern Maine Technical College in the summer after junior year, practice their skills.
The seniors also carry fire department pagers and can be paged out of classes at the high school to respond to an emergency.
They are responsible for all their class work and homework, and must keep their grades up.
While students used to respond to all fire and rescue calls during the school day, the recent growth of business in town has resulted in a change to that policy, according to program coordinator Bob Hawkes.
Because a number of daytime fire calls are from malfunctioning automatic alarm boxes at businesses, there is really no need for extra medical assistance. If the students left class for each of these calls, Hawkes said, they would never be in school at all. So the students are only paged out if the call is one that will require medical attention.
Several students plan to participate in rescue squads while in college, and some of them will be entering the medical field.
“It just opened a door for me,” said Karolina Kurka, who wants to be a doctor. Her colleagues echo her interest and dedication, even after spending a large part of the past summer in a classroom at SMTC studying to be an EMT.
“It was definitely worth it,” said Stephanie Byrne.
Scarborough Police Explorers
Scarborough students are not just working on the rescue squad.
Several are involved in law enforcement, through the 5-year-old Explorer post run by the town’s police department.
The group, while part of the Boy Scouts program, is open to both girls and boys between 15 and 21.
The program now includes about 10 people, according to community service officer Joe Giacomantonio.
The kids have a rank structure and uniforms, and get training in various aspects of law enforcement.
They do ride-alongs with town police officers, learn about dispatch and incident reporting, learn to direct traffic and perform various projects in the community, like putting up street signs required by the E-911 system.
Giacomantonio said they have no authority to make arrests, and do not carry firearms, though they do some firearms training on a shooting range.
The group is presently raising money to pay for a trip to Flagstaff, Ariz., in July 2002 for a conference of law enforcement Explorer posts. Among their activities will be a comedy night at the high school on Mar. 6, featuring local comedian Bob Marley.
The Explorer post provides a career-development opportunity for the students. “I really want to be in law enforcement,” said Explorer Lt. Ann Chaney. “My favorite part is a lot of the training.”
The group also sells Christmas trees at Bayley’s campground on Pine Point Road, and helps clean up a local YMCA campground.
Cape Elizabeth Student Firefighters
Several students at Cape Elizabeth High School also carry pagers and respond to calls during school hours. They take the Firefighter I course, a nationally required course for firefighters, one evening a week. They’re required to keep their grades up to stay in the program.
“It’s been very useful,” said Fire Chief McGouldrick. He said it’s a great way to make sure there are firefighters in the community.
The program offers the department additional personnel during the day, and though the students who haven’t completed their training can’t actually go into a burning building, they can help with opening and tending fire hydrants, getting drinks and tools for the firefighters, and doing other smaller, but no less important tasks around the fire scene, McGouldrick said.
“They’ve been real valuable to us,” he said.
Student firefighter Mike Walsh said he enjoys the work and the learning. He even comes to the Fire Department on his free periods to be available for calls or training.
Cape Elizabeth Student Rescue
The Cape firefighters have colleagues on the rescue side of things, as well. While they do not get certified as EMTs as part of the town’s Student Rescue program, they get exposed to a wide variety of emergency calls. They are not allowed to respond to calls involving suicide threats, people trapped in cars after accidents or other potentially disturbing scenarios.
The program is about 10 years old, according to the new coordinator, Mike Tranfaglia, a physician’s assistant who is also an ambulance driver for the squad.
Two students are on call each week when school is in session.
They wear radio pagers and respond to the fire station when a call comes in. They are allowed to decide whether to go.
“The ambulance is going to run whether they’re there or not,” Tranfaglia said.
When they go on a call, they don’t perform direct patient care, but instead observe what happens and help out by being go-fers for the EMTs, getting slings or other medical equipment from the ambulance.
They do learn to take vital signs and sometimes are asked to do that in the course of a call, Tranfaglia said.
At least once each month the group, which now numbers four, meets with Tranfaglia to discuss the past month’s runs. They go over general principles of medicine, and Tranfaglia uses calls about chest pain, for example, to teach about the risk factors for heart disease.
He said some of the students go on to further careers in medicine or join the squad as EMTs, but not all do.
“It’s supposed to be educational exposure. We’re not trying to get members for Cape Rescue out of this,” Tranfaglia said.
Christopher Roy is one of the students in the group, and has been a part of the program since his sophomore year. He is now a senior and said he wants to become a physician. He is not sure whether he’ll specialize in emergency medicine or not, but he’s learning.
“It seemed like a good way to try it out,” Roy said. He said there is also satisfaction in the way he’s learning. “I like helping others.”
He is considering taking an EMT course in the spring, and said he enjoys working with the other members on the rescue squad and learning from their experience, though sometimes that can be a little stressful during a call when a medic needs to do something without a lot of questions.
Roy also said he enjoys meeting members of the public and learning about general safety issues.
“You get all sorts,” he said. “Everybody you meet is an interesting person.”
While their friends and classmates are playing sports, hanging out with friends or doing homework, some high school students in Scarborough and Cape Elizabeth would rather be out fighting fires, directing traffic or administering medical care to sick and injured people in their communities.
They learn skills they will use as police officers, firefighters and emergency medical personnel, and they begin serving their communities from a young age.
It is a crucial opportunity, according to Cape Elizabeth Fire Chief Philip McGouldrick, who got his start as a firefighter in South Portland’s student program 40 years ago.
“You get them when they’ve got some time and interest,” McGouldrick said, and before they go away to college and lose interest or no longer have the time to learn firefighting skills.
It offers another benefit to the towns, both of which are home to commuting workers. Fire and rescue volunteers are in shorter supply during the day, but the departments are bolstered by the students, who are nearly always around during school hours.
The students all must qualify for their extracurricular activities in the same way as student athletes do, by keeping grades up and by being responsible for any class work missed.
Going since the 1960s
The oldest program in the two towns is Scarborough’s student rescue squad, begun in 1968.
The program now involves seven or eight members each of the junior and senior classes at the high school.
They have weekly training sessions, in which juniors prepare for the Emergency Medical Technician training course mandated by the U.S. Department of Transportation. They learn basic first aid, CPR and how to splint broken bones. Seniors, who have taken the EMT course at Southern Maine Technical College in the summer after junior year, practice their skills.
The seniors also carry fire department pagers and can be paged out of classes at the high school to respond to an emergency.
They are responsible for all their class work and homework, and must keep their grades up.
While students used to respond to all fire and rescue calls during the school day, the recent growth of business in town has resulted in a change to that policy, according to program coordinator Bob Hawkes.
Because a number of daytime fire calls are from malfunctioning automatic alarm boxes at businesses, there is really no need for extra medical assistance. If the students left class for each of these calls, Hawkes said, they would never be in school at all. So the students are only paged out if the call is one that will require medical attention.
Several students plan to participate in rescue squads while in college, and some of them will be entering the medical field.
“It just opened a door for me,” said Karolina Kurka, who wants to be a doctor. Her colleagues echo her interest and dedication, even after spending a large part of the past summer in a classroom at SMTC studying to be an EMT.
“It was definitely worth it,” said Stephanie Byrne.
Scarborough Police Explorers
Scarborough students are not just working on the rescue squad.
Several are involved in law enforcement, through the 5-year-old Explorer post run by the town’s police department.
The group, while part of the Boy Scouts program, is open to both girls and boys between 15 and 21.
The program now includes about 10 people, according to community service officer Joe Giacomantonio.
The kids have a rank structure and uniforms, and get training in various aspects of law enforcement.
They do ride-alongs with town police officers, learn about dispatch and incident reporting, learn to direct traffic and perform various projects in the community, like putting up street signs required by the E-911 system.
Giacomantonio said they have no authority to make arrests, and do not carry firearms, though they do some firearms training on a shooting range.
The group is presently raising money to pay for a trip to Flagstaff, Ariz., in July 2002 for a conference of law enforcement Explorer posts. Among their activities will be a comedy night at the high school on Mar. 6, featuring local comedian Bob Marley.
The Explorer post provides a career-development opportunity for the students. “I really want to be in law enforcement,” said Explorer Lt. Ann Chaney. “My favorite part is a lot of the training.”
The group also sells Christmas trees at Bayley’s campground on Pine Point Road, and helps clean up a local YMCA campground.
Cape Elizabeth Student Firefighters
Several students at Cape Elizabeth High School also carry pagers and respond to calls during school hours. They take the Firefighter I course, a nationally required course for firefighters, one evening a week. They’re required to keep their grades up to stay in the program.
“It’s been very useful,” said Fire Chief McGouldrick. He said it’s a great way to make sure there are firefighters in the community.
The program offers the department additional personnel during the day, and though the students who haven’t completed their training can’t actually go into a burning building, they can help with opening and tending fire hydrants, getting drinks and tools for the firefighters, and doing other smaller, but no less important tasks around the fire scene, McGouldrick said.
“They’ve been real valuable to us,” he said.
Student firefighter Mike Walsh said he enjoys the work and the learning. He even comes to the Fire Department on his free periods to be available for calls or training.
Cape Elizabeth Student Rescue
The Cape firefighters have colleagues on the rescue side of things, as well. While they do not get certified as EMTs as part of the town’s Student Rescue program, they get exposed to a wide variety of emergency calls. They are not allowed to respond to calls involving suicide threats, people trapped in cars after accidents or other potentially disturbing scenarios.
The program is about 10 years old, according to the new coordinator, Mike Tranfaglia, a physician’s assistant who is also an ambulance driver for the squad.
Two students are on call each week when school is in session.
They wear radio pagers and respond to the fire station when a call comes in. They are allowed to decide whether to go.
“The ambulance is going to run whether they’re there or not,” Tranfaglia said.
When they go on a call, they don’t perform direct patient care, but instead observe what happens and help out by being go-fers for the EMTs, getting slings or other medical equipment from the ambulance.
They do learn to take vital signs and sometimes are asked to do that in the course of a call, Tranfaglia said.
At least once each month the group, which now numbers four, meets with Tranfaglia to discuss the past month’s runs. They go over general principles of medicine, and Tranfaglia uses calls about chest pain, for example, to teach about the risk factors for heart disease.
He said some of the students go on to further careers in medicine or join the squad as EMTs, but not all do.
“It’s supposed to be educational exposure. We’re not trying to get members for Cape Rescue out of this,” Tranfaglia said.
Christopher Roy is one of the students in the group, and has been a part of the program since his sophomore year. He is now a senior and said he wants to become a physician. He is not sure whether he’ll specialize in emergency medicine or not, but he’s learning.
“It seemed like a good way to try it out,” Roy said. He said there is also satisfaction in the way he’s learning. “I like helping others.”
He is considering taking an EMT course in the spring, and said he enjoys working with the other members on the rescue squad and learning from their experience, though sometimes that can be a little stressful during a call when a medic needs to do something without a lot of questions.
Roy also said he enjoys meeting members of the public and learning about general safety issues.
“You get all sorts,” he said. “Everybody you meet is an interesting person.”
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