‘It is our mission and purpose to serve the community needs in our region’

Heather Graves

Staff

October 21, 2024

HORICON – Moraine Park Technical College recently expanded its offerings and footprint with the opening of the Horicon Regional Center (1210 Wrucke St.) in Horicon.

“It is our mission and purpose to serve the community needs that reside within our region,” Bonnie Baerwald, president of Moraine Park Technical College, said. “We understand and are committed to making sure that the needs of our communities are met, and part of that is to look at programs like fire training.”

Baerwald said the Horicon Regional Center – which received a warm welcome from the community during its official ribbon-cutting and grand-opening celebration last month – is designed to enhance the college’s fire and emergency training offerings.

Though Moraine Park has fire training as a program, Baerwald said it was mostly done using a mobile unit.

“We took that out to local fire departments,” she said. “But the training of that mobile unit was quite limited – departments needed more training than we could provide.”

Baerwald said the mobile unit was also aged and needed to either be replaced or a new solution was needed.

The small tower Moraine Park had on its Beaver Dam campus was also small, and with the campus being landlocked, an expansion wasn’t possible.

“We also had limited times when we could use the facility, and navigating firetrucks and other equipment on the campus was a real challenge,” she said.

Here, she said, is where the Horicon Regional Center came into play.

“All of that created the scenario as to why we wanted to focus on fire training and providing a more robust training center for our firefighters,” she said.

Center specifics

The center includes an 18,000-square-foot building that houses lab and instructional space and a 3,840-square-foot fire training tower.

Baerwald said the center offers a safer training environment that enables live fire conditions, prop burning and controlled fire scenarios with minimized risk, providing trainees with hands-on experience in real-world situations.

“They have different rooms in the new training tower that have different types of accelerants… so there is a much more robust training environment than we had in the past,” she said. 

The tower, Baerwald said, also has an observation space so trainers can watch trainees during different types of training situations.

The property also has an on-site pond, which she said can be utilized when training students how to draft water.

“A lot of our local rural fire departments, if they don’t have a water source, like a fire hydrant, they have to draft water out of a pond to put out a fire,” she said. “So, we have that capacity for training now. We will certainly add a lot more different types of props and different scenario trainings in the future.”

Though the new center won’t necessarily increase the number of students Moraine Park has each semester in its fire training programs, Baerwald said it will definitely impact the college’s efficiency of training “because we’re not dragging a train trailer to 50 different fire departments.”

“And (it will also impact) the cost and time commitment now that fire departments can come and bring their equipment on-site and train together at a very robust training solutions center,” she said.

In the same breath, however, Baerwald said Moraine Park is adding a new program – a fire protection technician associate’s degree.

“That just started up this year, and it includes fire training plus leadership training,” she said. “So those individuals who want to move up the ladder in their career and into leadership at the fire department – this would be perfect for them, whether they’re brand new students or existing firefighters who want to come back and get some leadership training.”

Though the center is “open for business” for the fall 2024 semester, Baerwald said the plan is to continue expanding the programming offered.

“It is going to take us a little bit of time, and certainly the community interests will be part of that decision-making,” she said. 

Baerwald said the center will also be available for community programming and events.

“The center itself can be a hub for community utilization,” she said. “I don’t think the City of Horicon has a lot of public spaces for meetings and community gatherings, and certainly not to the level of technology enhancements that we have at the center. And so I think the community is excited that we can have some activities, engagements and community events out there.”

The Horicon Regional Center is located in a TID, which Baerwald said is one of the reasons the City of Horicon wanted to partner with Moraine Park on the project.

“They’re hoping we can spark economic development for the remainder of the parcels in that district,” she said. “Again, we are all about workforce, talent, training and energizing economic development in the regions that we serve. We certainly hope that this center sparks new ideation and energy into creating more economic development for the City of Horicon and the surrounding areas.”

Baerwald said the center was also built to create a central training location for rural high schools in the surrounding areas.

“We’re hoping to have high school training opportunities at the center as well,” she said. “Again, that is part of our vision to expand that space.”

A needed upgrade

According to the National Volunteer Fire Council, many local volunteer fire departments are struggling to meet staffing needs.

It states that in the last 35 years, the number of volunteer firefighters in the U.S.  has consistently declined, while call volume has more than tripled.

In Wisconsin, according to the U.S. Fire Administration, more than 78% of fire departments are volunteer.

Baerwald said the Horicon Regional Center is Moraine Park’s way of doing what it can to help support the needs of the communities surrounding the college.

“Our communities aren’t able to find volunteer firefighters anymore,” she said. “The training requirements and dedicated volunteer time (required of volunteer firefighters) are beyond what the new generation of citizens are willing to look at,” she said. 

Because of that, Baerwald said it is important that Moraine Park’s training opportunities are local, “so they’re not spending time on the road to get these trainings if they want to pursue that career or help out in a volunteer capacity.”

Though the fire training offered by Moraine Park isn’t a profit center for the college, Baerwald said, “it’s the right thing to do.”

“We will continue to not only offer what we have today but continue to expand our offerings,” she said.

Baerwald said she has never personally seen such excitement for the opening of a fire training facility as she has for the Horicon Regional Center.

“The fire faculty that we have are so excited about the new opportunities they have been given with this new site to train the up-and-coming and the incumbent fire professionals in a way that they deserve to make sure that they are fully prepared and can handle any situation that they’ll face in the community,” she said.

The excitement in the community, Baerwald said, has been equally positive.

“We were extremely happy and surprised by the turnout of community members coming out to see our new center,” she said. “Small communities don’t always have a college presence – so that, too, brings a level of excitement and curiosity.”