Teaching At National Level
DeKalb County native, Anthony Clifton, Director of the DeKalb County Emergency Management Agency (EMA), is teaching on a national level.
“How I got started in this is a long little story,” Clifton began. “When I first got started in EMA, I was invited to a pilot class that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was doing for new people. I have been in response my whole career. Everything I’ve done involved responding to emergencies and disasters. So I knew response very, very well. But in emergency management, there’s a lot more to it than just response. We’re the people responsible for getting everybody to work and play well together. If you have an incident where multiple agencies or multiple jurisdictions come together, we’re the people who help sort all of that out and support the incident. So I moved from a direct response role to a support role. You have municipal, county, state, and federal people all trying to work together, and sometimes you have to work gently with the different agencies. I was weak in that.”
The role of FEMA has five different missions: protection and prevention, preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery.
“Recovery is where you get into grant money, tons and tons of paperwork, and stuff like that,” Clifton explained. “I was strong in recover but really weak in the other four areas. There were people all over the country that were in the same boat as me, so FEMA came up with a class called the National Emergency Management Agency Academy. It was an academy, just like the police academy or fire academy; an academy where you learn the basic stuff that your job requires. I took it, and it did exactly what it was supposed to do; it filled in all the blanks for me and taught me how to do what needed to be done. I embraced the principals and learned from it.”
After that training, Clifton was later invited to become a trainer for the Basic Academy (intended for people in the beginning stages of their EMA careers, 0-3 years). As a result of that, he was ultimately invited by FEMA to become a trainer in other aspects as well. According to Clifton, he has been serving in that capacity since 2013. During that time, he has trained for FEMA all over the country, to teach people what he does.
With the success of the Basic Academy, FEMA then created an Advanced Academy (for people in the middle stages of their careers, people who want to advance to a higher level. Clifton applied for the Advanced Academy and was accepted by FEMA to attend, which ultimately led to him being invited to become a trainer in the advanced academy in the fall of 2018.
“The Advanced Academy is a series of 4 week-long classes, 1 per fiscal quarter. FEMA Region 4 has eight states: Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. The Advanced Academy was originally only taught in Washington D.C., but they decided to roll it out to the regions, so I was invited to become the instructor in FEMA Region 4. We had the first class in December, one in March, one in May, and then one graduated last week [the week of July 15-19]. We started with 40 students. It involves some pretty significant work. The trainees have to write a paper where they present new ideas that can be adopted at the national level. Those papers are published by the National Emergency Management Institute at the Emergency Management Training Center. They’re placed in the library and serve as research.”
Clifton concluded, “We’re all supposed to work and play well together. Fortunately, our County Commission sees that value and allows me to go and train others to do what I do. It’s an honor to be chosen even to attend the Advanced Academy. I’m one of only 16 instructors, nationwide, that teaches the Advanced Academy.”
Also, according to Clifton, Michael Posey, Deputy Director of the DeKalb County EMA, is 1 of 40 people in the nation, and 1 of only two people in FEMA Region 4 that has completed FEMA’s Executive Academy. Clifton himself has not even completed the Executive Academy.
Mountain Valley News would like to take this opportunity to congratulate these men and encourage them to keep up the good work they’re doing for our county’s citizens.