Aspire Academy immerses girls in police, fire experience
Public-safety instructors challenge participants to 'do hard things'
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Even though we're showcasing our jobs, it's empowering and inspiring these girls to show that they can do hard things. We're trying to break down some mental and emotional barriers where they think they can't do something.”
Lexi Royster stood at the foot of her greatest fear — and faced it.
Royster, deathly afraid of heights, was at the bottom of a fire department ladder truck with the 100-foot ladder fully extended, nothing but blue sky above and cement below.
“C’mon on, Lexi,” Gilbert Police Officer Dani Covey yelled as Royster started a steady ascension on the ladder. Some of Royster’s teammates in Aspire Academy — a four-day immersive experience for girls ages 14 to 18 to learn about public-safety careers and take up some of the training challenges associated with police and fire — also offered encouragement.
Royster, just a few steps up, looked over at Covey on the ground with an expression as if the officer, who had talked her into going up, had just served her a heaping pile of spaghetti, the dish the 16-year-old Mesa resident and Highland High School sophomore despises most.
But she did not stop, or even hesitate. While Royster, harnessed for safety, did not exactly scramble up the length of the ladder, she did not falter, either, and made it all the way to the “bucket” on top.
As Royster climbed, Covey laughed a bit as she recounted how she got Royster to agree to go all the way up after she agreed to go to a “100” mark on the ladder’s side, about a third of the way up. Covey admitted it was perhaps not the gentlest nudge.
“What do you think will happen if you fall from 100?” Covey asked Royster.
“It’ll hurt.”
“What do you think will happen if you fall from the top?”
“It’ll hurt.”
“Get up there then.”
When Royster arrived back on ground to the excited greetings of her teammates, her wide smile was the badge that signaled her accomplishment.
“It's just the thought of falling off of a high place is so scary,” said Royster, who was concerned about having a panic attack and had to remind herself to keep breathing. “But it's actually really nice once you get up there. I mean, you can see everything around you, and it's really pretty.”
Royster was one of 31 girls from across the Valley attending the Aspire Academy this spring. This is the eighth year of the academy, originally the idea of Mesa Fire Chief Mary Cameli and held at the Mesa Public Safety Training Facility.
The academy now runs twice a year, during fall and spring breaks, and the site rotates as 21 public-safety agencies, including nine fire and eight police departments in the Valley, are involved. The most recent academy, which ran March 16-19, was held at the 2-year-old Gilbert Public Safety Training Facility. In the fall, it will be in Chandler.
Covey, 34, a 10-year veteran of the police force, was one of the event’s coordinators. She said the event should be a confidence booster for the participants when they are finished with the program.
“We want them to really know what they're capable of and to know what their power is and to see them working together as a team with that camaraderie,” she said. “Man, it's incredible to see with these teenage girls.”
Marketing a career
The event is an opportunity for police and fire to market public-safety careers to girls as they seek to expand their forces in what traditionally has been a male-dominated field. For example, five of the municipal police departments involved — Apache Junction, Gilbert, Mesa, Phoenix and Queen Creek — are part of the national “30 by 30” initiative to bring their departments to have 30% of their force be women by 2030.
But another of the event’s coordinators, Sarah Dutton of Gilbert Fire and Rescue, said it goes beyond that.
“Even though we're showcasing our jobs, it's empowering and inspiring these girls to show that they can do hard things,” she said. “We're trying to break down some mental and emotional barriers where they think they can't do something.”
That payoff can be immediate, too.
“You'll see some girls today that might be afraid of heights and then they do this really, really cool, scary, challenging thing,” Dutton said. “And just seeing the smiles on their faces is what it's all about for us.”
Program format
The program started on a Thursday morning with check-in and introductions. After lunch, they had classes on nutrition, human trafficking, fire prevention, and dispatching. They finished the day with team-building events and police and fire demonstrations.
Friday, the girls did many police training exercises, starting with a morning workout and moving into a defensive tactics session that taught them to be aware of their surroundings and how to strike or kick and then put them into different situations.
“From the beginning of the session to the end, two and a half hours later, their confidence, you just saw it absolutely, absolutely skyrocket throughout that process and everybody's cheering each other on,” said Covey, who regularly works as a recruit training officer. “It was really great to see.”
The remainder of the day was spent in different police training exercises, including ride-alongs on the driving course and canine training.
It was fire’s turn on Saturday with exercises that included CPR, rappelling, victim extrication from vehicles and hose deployment.
Sunday was a chance to bring it all together. Dutton called it a “super cool day” as the girls chose to work as firefighters or police officers.
“They take everything they learn from the weekend, and they apply it to scenes that we put on,” she said. “We bring actors in, we have makeup come in, we have people be patients, and we create a car accident, all these things. And the girls get to pick what they want to do.”
Bringing girls in
The first day may be the toughest as the girls give up the back end of their spring break and their phones for four days and three nights with strangers. Some did not even want to be here at the start.
That was the case for Lexi Royster and her 14-year-old sister Chloe, an eighth-grader at Highland Junior High. Their mom pushed them to do it, telling them she never had these kinds of opportunities growing up.
“At first, I felt like everyone was looking at me,” Chloe said. “It was just me and my sister. I was practically glued to her hip for the first part, and then we got separated because she got put in a different group than me, and then I was really quiet. I didn't talk to anybody.”
Eventually, though, she did start communicating and now thinks she has made about five or six friends. It has been much the same for her sister.
“I’ve met so many great people here,” Lexi said. “Not only the officers, but also the kids. I've made a lot of great friends.”
Not everyone needed to be roped into it by parents. Valentina Bruno, an eighth grader at Copper Trails Elementary School in Goodyear, said she got interested when her dad showed a Facebook video and told her about the camp, though she had never really thought about a public-safety career.
On the other hand, Alexa Bracci, 17, of Queen Creek, is taking criminal justice as a career and technical education course as a junior at Higley High School, and her instructor, David Claridge, encouraged her to apply.
Bracci comes to her interest naturally. Her father is a firefighter and her uncle a police officer.
“First responders, they've always been in my family, and I just really wanted to help people since I was younger,” she said. “So ever since elementary school I was having homemade costumes, being a police officer and stuff like that.”
Alyssa Perez, a 17-year-old senior at Avondale’s Agua Fria High School, also has a father who is a firefighter. This was a chance to see what her dad does for a living, though she’s planning to go to college to study veterinary technology.
“There's always a part of me that was wondering (about) working with police dogs,” Perez said. “I've always wanted to either train them or be a handler. I've always thought that was really interesting, and I figured this is a way for me to get up close to, one, see what my dad is doing, and two, see if I would like to be a canine unit officer.”
Perez naturally was fascinated then by the canine unit and learning how dogs do their searches. But she said the whole weekend lived up to her expectations. She also enjoyed learning to shoot a gun on police day and deploying hoses and searching in confined spaces on fire day.
“I think this is an amazing experience for young ladies,” she said. “I think it's great exposure for them to get into these public-safety careers, and I'm so glad that we're finally bringing awareness to the minority of women in these careers.”
That is exactly what Dutton and Covey want to hear, though both expect the training will be beneficial to the girls whatever career path they choose. Covey also grew up in a public-safety household.
“I have a drawing at home from kindergarten, and the book is ‘When I Grow Up I Want to Be,’ and you had to draw a picture,” Covey said. “So my dad was a trooper and they had blue stars on the side of their car. And I said, ‘I want to be a blue star, just like my dad.’ And all these years later, here I am.”
Dutton, who has been with Gilbert Fire & Rescue for a year and a half, wanted to be a doctor and got her undergraduate degree in pre-med biology, then got a job at John C. Lincoln Medical Center in north Phoenix.
“I was a scribe there and I absolutely loved emergency medicine, but I realized the hospital wasn't the right setting for me,” she said. “Fortunately for me, Phoenix Fire was always in. They were super, super outgoing and friendly, and they chatted with me about being an EMT to get the first responder side of emergency medicine and about the fire service.”
Working with men
Dutton said the men in the Gilbert department have continued to be encouraging to her.
“All of my male counterparts are the most encouraging, positive people I've ever met,” she said. “I feel very, very fortunate. They challenge me because they know I can do the same things that they can.”
Covey also has found the majority of men she works with to be supportive.
“When I say a majority, that means there still is a minority out there that maybe don't think that women are cut out for these careers,” she said. “And those are the ones that I work really hard to prove wrong. And those are the ones that when we go out to the range, I want to outshoot them, I want to outrun them. I want to come out here and do everything that they can do just as well.”
It’s that attitude that perhaps makes Covey, Dutton and the other female instructors at Aspire Academy role models for the participants.
“It's such a weighted term, in a good way, because I think everybody wants to think of themselves as a role model at some point,” Covey said. “But I will say when the girls are coming up at the end of the day and you hear comments of, ‘I want to be just like you when I grow up,’ or ‘this is what I want to do when I grow up,’ I couldn't go home more satisfied after that. That is the biggest compliment I can get over the weekend.”
Covey and others had an impact on Perez, for one.
“I think women can do anything,” she said. “I do. We're units. We're meant to be out here.”
Tom Blodgett can be reached by email at tblodgett@iniusa.org or follow him @sp_blodgett on Twitter. We would like to invite our readers to submit their civil comments, pro or con, on this issue. Email AZOpinions@iniusa.org.
Tom Blodgett Senior News Editor | Gilbert @sp_blodgett
Meet Tom Tom Blodgett joined Independent Newsmedia, Inc., USA, in 2022, when the company acquired Community Impact Newspaper's Phoenix-area properties. Raised in Arizona, he has spent more than 35 years in journalism in the state.
Community: He has served as an instructional professional in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication since 2005, and is editorial adviser to The State Press, the university's independent student media outlet. He also is director of operations for an 18U girls fastpitch softball team from Gilbert.
Education: Arizona State University with a BS in Journalism.
Random Fact: He lived in Belgium during his freshman year of high school.
Hobbies: Tweeting enthusiastically about ASU softball (season-ticket holder) and grumpily about other local sports (pessimistic fan).
Aspire Academy,
Dani Covey,
Sarah Dutton,
Lexi Royster,
Chloe Royster,
Alexa Bracci,
Valentina Bruno,
Alyssa Perez,
Gilbert Public Safety Training Facility,
Mary Cameli,
Gilbert Police,
Gilbert Fire and Rescue,
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