If I were in charge, part 1

My daughter suggested doing a series of "If I were in charge" posts, since we talk about it all the time.

So. Here goes.


If I were in charge around here, I'd do a lot more coordinating than gets done. I'd work on getting all of the agencies in the county to work together.  EMS and Fire.

The way it is right now, each agency does its own training- or not. Some agencies have their shit together, and do a GREAT job of providing regular, high quality training.  Others don't. Most are probably somewhere in the middle.

We have found that if we make the effort to find out what training is happening where and when, and ask the right people, we are welcome to go participate in most of the training out there. But in order to do that, we need to know their schedule, and who is in charge, and what they are planning and know all of that in time to ask and get an answer and make plans to go.  That is easier to know with some agencies than others, because we know more people in some places than in others.

I have been to training with about 10 other agencies in the county over the years.

It sure would be easier if someone kept all that information in one place, AND if it became "county policy" that all training was "open door," meaning that any county provider would be welcome. It would save a lot of time, it would save money (by not having to pay to provide the same training multiple times to small groups) and it would make a lot more quality training available, especially to the smaller agencies and/or the people from agencies who don't do any in-house training.

I don't understand why this isn't already being done.
We've never run into any problems with going to other agencies to join in their training. Ever. We have always been welcome.
But we (my kids and I) are the only people in the county doing this.
We never see any other people going to training at agencies other than their own except for a couple of pairs of "sister departments" who regularly train together. We don't see individuals making the effort to get invited to training.
Occasionally, on the nightly announcements the county does, an agency will announce their training and specify that "all county monitors are invited to attend" but that happens maybe two or three times a year, at best.

We have a person called the "county coordinator," but he doesn't seem to do any actual coordinating, at least not anything I'd call that. I have no idea what his job actually is, but that's a subject for another day.