My community service was a blast! On the first day I put an hour into cleaning out our CHAD House that we built in our construction tech college program to get ready for it’s sale. This house was built in the neighborhood that needed a little TLC and by building it here it helped to encourage the neighborhood to clean their yards which ended up raising the property value of this area. The next day I spent an hour handing out flyers with Erica K Pile, one of my supervisors at Dodge City Inspections. This let the community know of the smoke detectors that would be installed later in the week with help from the fire department in Dodge City. We didn’t have too many people answer the door but by Wednesday when we went to install the smoke alarms there was a great turn out. We spent a good part of the day installing smoke alarms in nearly every single house in a 2 to 3 block radius. Many of these houses either had small kids or old couples living in them, and a home in this area had recently burned down. This was a great event for the community and raised awareness in the city about the need for smoke alarms. The last day of my community service was spent helping the Dodge City Fire Department and the Dodge City Inspections go through the community college campus and perform their fire inspections. This included making sure the exit signs were working, hazard lights were working, egress doors were in good operating condition and there were not any other hazards that needed to be addressed. The most challenging part of my community service was having to open up to people who I encountered with the smoke alarm installs, but I enjoyed the new people I got to meet. I am glad that I chose these projects as my community service. After learning about some of the recent fires that have happened in our communities and being able to help spread awareness I feel like this has given me the ability to go forward in our community with confidence and teach other people about the need for fire protection.

