SAUGUS — A group of about four dozen high school juniors fanned out across town Thursday — spending a morning in the life of firefighters, police officers, and wildlife experts, among several other professions.
Roughly 45 students took part in Saugus’s annual “Shadow Day” event Thursday morning, with the goal of getting an inside look at the professions they might want to eventually pursue. Each year, the district partners with the Saugus Business Education Collaborative to get the event off the ground, with the collaborative footing the bill and the district ensuring students get the experiences they want. This year, School Counselors Katie Pinette and Bethany Norton ran point.
After a morning shadowing, students, district officials, and fire department officials gathered at Prince Pizza for lunch.
Pinette said Shadow Day is really driven by students, who tell the counselors where they would like to go, with the police and fire departments typically at the top of the field. She said the program offers students an opportunity to connect to the community and get a more in-depth understanding of what it takes to be a working professional.
“It gives them a chance to explore and kind of get out and actually have some hands-on, experiential learning,” Pinette said.
She added that employers also benefit by getting a sense of how high schoolers are preparing to enter the workforce or what colleges they might be looking at.
“Sometimes it is a good way for the students to maybe say that they didn’t want a career that they thought they might, or the opposite,” Pinette said.
Shadow Day is a highlight every year, she said, with students always excited to come back.
SBEC Chairman Peter Rossetti, also a Town Meeting member representing Precinct 2, said Shadow Day began decades ago as an attempt to help students identify potential careers. He quipped that the typical answer when students are asked, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” is “cowboy.”
“By doing Shadow Day, where they get a chance to go out and actually see what these people do, it gives them a little bit better idea of what they might be interested in, and then they can start thinking about it and learning more about it,” he said.
The collaborative hosts fundraisers throughout the year to facilitate Shadow Day, Rossetti said, adding that the Saugus business community needs not just clients and customers, but also employees.
The pandemic and smaller class sizes have reduced the number of students who participate, Rossetti said, with more than 80 participating students in years past.
At the fire department Wednesday morning, students were given a look at some of the behind-the-scenes duties of firefighters, like checking equipment, doing chores, and making sure they’re prepared for whatever comes about. Capt. Billy Cross, who facilitates the program for the department, said they are then put through a search where they have to rescue a child.
This year, a group of seven girls shadowed the fire department — the first time in Cross’s nearly three decades doing Shadow Day that he’s had a group of exclusively women participate. He said they were also the first group to successfully rescue the baby and get out in time.
Cross said watching students run through the drill is a similar experience each year.
“They come in eager. A little apprehensive, sometimes a little scared, and then watching them do it, they make all the same mistakes that a brand new firefighter would make coming off the street,” Cross said. “We talk about that and we try to give them a message that, ‘Find a job you love to do, and then you’ll never work a day in your life.’”
While not all of the students who visited the fire department Thursday are actually interested in becoming firefighters, Cross said he hoped they gained a new appreciation for the job.
The department is also proof that the program meets its stated goal, with Cross saying more than a dozen current Saugus firefighters were once participants in Shadow Day.
Madi Femino was among the students who visited the fire department Thursday morning. She said she chose the department over visiting Winthrop High School to do athletic training, and that the all-female environment created a level of comfort.
The drill itself was scary at first, Femino said, adding that the students kept bumping into each other and their surroundings before ultimately prevailing.
“We were proud of ourselves after we did it because we accomplished it,” she said.
Femino added that she feels she got a new perspective on what it’s like to be a firefighter.
Unlike Femino, Michael Cella has long aspired to be a police officer. He said nothing about his Shadow Day changed that — instead, it simply reaffirmed his commitment.
“The highlight definitely was the detective work,” he said, adding that the station’s work environment was another high point. “They’ve kept it very fresh and easygoing. The work environment for the police station is a very well-maintained work environment. It’s all friends, they’re all buddies there. And that’s what’s important.”
The visit did open his eyes to other areas of the work he likely hadn’t considered before.
“I never thought of being a detective, I really got interested in the detective work,” he said. “It definitely was an overall great experience.”
