McCallie Sophomore and TEPS member Charlie Bernstein holds a smoke alarm
During the summer, McCallie suffered a significant fire in the school’s Sports and Activities Center, and it was thanks to the quick and diligent work of the Chattanooga Fire Department that the SAC and potentially other buildings are still standing.
In the time since the fire, the McCallie community sought to say thanks to the men and women of the CFD who responded that night to campus, and conversations between school administrators and the CFD led to the perfect gift: smoke alarms.
CFD conducts a program around Chattanooga in partnership with the American Red Cross in which firefighters go door-to-door in particularly fire-prone neighborhoods installing free smoke alarms in houses that don’t have systems installed to alert the occupants to a fire in their home. The alarms used are not cheap, however: they include 10-year lifespan batteries, among other features designed to save lives.
That’s where the members of TEPS, McCallie’s sophomore leadership organization, stepped in, raising funds to help purchase 200 of the alarms. Last week, the alarms were given to CFD for deployment in high-risk areas of the city.
“The work of the CFD saved our campus from an immense amount of further damage this summer, and we felt it was important to thank them,” said Headmaster Lee Burns. “I’m proud of our young men for stepping up to make our gratitude known in a meaningful way.”
McCallie donated 200 smoke detectors to the Chattanooga Fire Department