11.19.2025: Drake's Fire Academy Grad Family Night

We went and celebrated Family Night tonight at Drake's fire academy. He has been attending the fire academy for Tempe fire, but it was at the Scottsdale academy.  It has been cold & raining all week and all day - and there was a tornado warning not too far from where we were at - but the show must go on. Luckily, we had perfect clear skies right above us for the whole night.

This was a pre-graduation demo for the families to show us what the recruits have been doing the past 16 weeks.  They had speeches, fed us dinner, showed a slide show, allowed us to walk around all the skills areas to see what they have been doing for the past 4 months, then did some demos. It was awesome!!! 

For the skills demo, Drake was picked to fight a fire on a "vehicle". It was a full experience from call, dress, ride in truck, suit up, prep, fight fire, to end of fire.  It was very cool. Most of the other recruits did other skills tests but this was the biggest, with an actual real fire to fight.

At the end of the evening they burned their red recruit shirts to celebrate moving to the next step as full blown fire fighters!  What an amazing evening!! So very proud of Drake!!!