Southwood Fire Is Recruiting High School Students and Running Calls With Jamesville. Statewide, Volunteer Ranks Have Fallen by About 40,000

The Southwood Fire Department published its plans for the coming year in the Town of Onondaga’s newsletter. On the page it is a friendly list: CPR classes, a garage sale, a chili cook-off, Breakfast with Santa, QR codes for event reminders.

Two items in that list are not community programming. They are staffing strategy.

The department is beginning to welcome high school students as members in training. And it is working alongside the Jamesville Fire Department, responding together on calls.

Read those two next to what has happened to volunteer firefighting in New York State and the picture sharpens considerably.

The number behind the strategy

According to the Firefighters Association of the State of New York, the statewide volunteer firefighter count has fallen from roughly 120,000 to about 80,000 over the past two decades. That is a decline of about 40,000 people, or roughly a third of the force.

FASNY attributes the drop to several pressures at once. Two-income households have less time available for what has become a more demanding commitment, with training requirements that are substantially heavier than a generation ago. Family and financial responsibilities compete for the same hours. And a significant share of the existing volunteer force is aging out, retiring or leaving the state.

The consequence FASNY describes is the part that matters for a town like Onondaga. A smaller group of volunteers is absorbing an increasing number of calls, and departments across New York are struggling to maintain minimum staffing and routinely relying on mutual aid to respond safely.

That is the context in which a department starts recruiting teenagers and formalizing joint response with the department next door.

Recruiting from the high school

The newsletter describes the youth program plainly. Southwood is proud to begin welcoming high school students into the department as members in training. It frames the value in terms of leadership opportunities, confidence and cultivating the next generation of firefighters and EMTs, with students gaining hands-on experience while learning service, teamwork and responsibility.

All of that is true and none of it is the whole reason.

A volunteer department cannot hire its way out of a staffing shortage. Its only pipeline is people who live nearby and are willing. Reaching them at 16 rather than at 30 extends the window in which someone might join, and it builds familiarity with the department before adult obligations make joining harder.

Departments that run youth or cadet programs are, in effect, running a fifteen year recruitment plan. Southwood’s newsletter also mentions a CADET program elsewhere in the same issue.

Two departments, one response

The second item is the joint response with Jamesville.

The newsletter says Southwood will be working closely alongside the Jamesville Fire Department, responding together on calls to strengthen coverage, collaboration and overall emergency response for the area, and describes it as enhancing safety and reinforcing mutual support between neighboring departments.

Mutual aid, where one department calls another for help on a specific incident, has existed for as long as fire departments have. What is described here is a step past that: two departments planning to run calls together as a standing arrangement rather than an exception.

FASNY’s own framing explains why that spreads. When individual departments cannot reliably field enough people, the response has to be assembled from more than one roster. Formalizing it in advance is faster than requesting it after a call comes in.

For residents, the practical effect is that the truck that arrives may carry members of two departments, and that is a feature rather than a failure.

The CPR classes are part of it too

The item most likely to be read as pure community goodwill is the launch of community CPR classes. The department describes it as providing lifesaving skills directly to residents so neighbors can help neighbors in critical moments, and says preparedness starts at home.

That is also a staffing answer, in a quieter way.

In cardiac arrest, the minutes before an ambulance arrives determine outcomes more than anything that happens afterward. In a district where response is assembled from volunteers who have to leave their jobs or homes to get to the station first, bystander CPR is not a supplement to the emergency response. For those first minutes, it is the emergency response.

Teaching it broadly is the cheapest available way to improve outcomes in exactly the interval that a volunteer staffing shortage makes longer.

The events are the recruitment

The community events read as tradition, and they are, but the department is explicit that they serve a second purpose.

The Community Garage Sale returns, described as an opportunity for families to connect while supporting the department. The Chili Cook-Off is back after what the department calls a tremendous response last year. Breakfast with Santa continues.

The newsletter even names the judges from the Open House Chili Cook-Off: Darcy Woodcock, John Mahar, Ryan McMahan, Rich McCarron and Jamie Farwell.

Volunteer departments recruit almost entirely through personal contact. Someone shows up to a chili cook-off, talks to a member, and finds out what joining involves. Events are the top of the funnel, and a department that describes its community events as central to its identity is describing both a tradition and a recruitment channel.

The department is also modernizing how it stays in touch. Southwood says it is going digital: residents can scan a QR code, complete a short questionnaire, and receive event reminders, updates and department news. The newsletter includes the code.

What the training commitment actually looks like

One reason the volunteer pool shrinks is that the job got harder to enter, and that is worth being concrete about rather than hand-waving.

An interior structural firefighter in New York works through a state certification sequence before being allowed to enter a burning building. That is classroom hours plus practical evolutions, held on evenings and weekends, spread across months. Departments that also run emergency medical service add EMT certification on top, which is its own multi-month course with a state exam at the end.

None of that is optional and none of it is quick. It is the correct standard, because the alternative is sending undertrained people into fires. It is also a genuine barrier for someone working two jobs or raising small children.

That combination, a rising standard applied to a shrinking pool of available hours, is the mechanism behind the statewide numbers. It also explains why reaching a high school student matters. A 16 year old has something a 35 year old with a mortgage frequently does not, which is time.

Why joint response is the sensible answer

There is a version of this story that treats two departments running calls together as a decline. It is not.

A structure fire requires a minimum number of trained people arriving quickly, in defined roles. One crew is on the line, another handles water supply, another does search, another stands by as a rapid intervention team if something goes wrong. That arithmetic does not shrink because a roster does.

If neither of two neighboring departments can reliably field that whole set on a Tuesday afternoon, there are only two honest options. Consolidate, or plan to arrive together.

Planning to arrive together is the less disruptive of the two, and it keeps both stations, both identities and both sets of community events intact. It is a practical answer to a real constraint, arrived at locally, and it costs taxpayers nothing extra.

Residents of the Southwood and Jamesville districts should read the arrangement that way rather than as a warning sign.

The rest of the department’s year

For completeness, the newsletter lists what else Southwood has planned, and the ordinary items are part of the same picture.

The department describes new recruitment strategies aimed at long-term strength, exploring what it calls fresh approaches to reach people who feel called to serve, through expanded outreach, youth engagement and modern digital communication.

It frames its leadership as focused on operational excellence while strengthening the foundation of the department for years to come, and credits that leadership with keeping members supported and training strong.

Those are the sentences a department writes when it is thinking in decades rather than in budget years. Whether the strategy works will not be visible this season. It will be visible in whoever is still turning out for calls in fifteen years.

How to actually get involved

The department’s own instructions are specific, and worth repeating for anyone in the district who reads this and considers it.

Whether the interest is taking a CPR class, joining as a member, volunteering at events, or simply staying connected, Southwood invites residents to stop by the station on Tuesday evenings, or to follow the department on Facebook at SouthwoodVolunteerFireDept.

Tuesday evenings is the detail that matters. Volunteer departments generally hold drill or business meetings on a fixed weeknight, and that is the night when someone is there to talk to.

The department is led by Chief Robert Naugle and President Tom Bouvia. Its stated mission, as printed, is to serve with pride, protect with integrity, and build a department that reflects the strength of the community.

Why this is worth a story

Municipal newsletters are full of department updates that nobody reads twice. This one happens to contain, in a paragraph about welcoming students and a paragraph about working with the neighbors, a local instance of a statewide problem that has been building for twenty years.

CNY Signal is reporting it because the two facts are more useful together than apart. The department’s plans came from the Town of Onondaga’s Spring and Summer 2026 newsletter. The statewide decline from about 120,000 volunteers to about 80,000 comes from FASNY, verified independently rather than taken from the newsletter, which does not mention it.

Nothing in the Southwood item says the department is short-staffed, and this story does not claim it is. What it says is that a volunteer department in the Town of Onondaga is doing the specific things departments do when the volunteer pool statewide has shrunk by a third: reaching younger, partnering sideways, and teaching residents to act in the minutes before help arrives.