NIPSTA is the acronym for Northern Illinois Public Safety Training Academy. It is a intergovernmental organization. NIPSTA was being developed before 9/11. A bit after 9/11 occurred the door finally opened for many different types of response teams to train. Duty, pride, and tradition are words that the people who are apart of NIPSTA live by. NIPSTA is runned by Jill Ramaker. She is very important to the history of this training academy because she was the first women to run it. She had first went to paramedic school and started working for a fire department, then got a masters in homeland security. After that she had became a Nurse during 9/11, but then came back to Public Safety and became apart of NIPSTA. She came to NIPSTA three years ago then got a masters in law. There are 450 instructors there but not many are women not only is she one of the few she is the executive director. NIPSTA gets their firefighter recruits from fire fighters who have been hired by a department but the department sends them to NIPSTA for training and they pay $3500 for them to go. At NIPSTA these response teams come together to train together. One of the activities that we saw when we went to visit was the collapsed building. There were firefighters from different towns working to resolve the problem of the collapsed building quickly but safely. This is a really important skill for firefighters to know because a lot of buildings that are on fire collapse. Knowing how to respond to that type of emergency is always good because you'll learn how to quickly and carefully remove the debris to save lives.

Amelia Barnes