Four Missing Hours, a Records Request, and a Borrowed Signature
You have just finished a 40-hour certification course with 30 students. Student J missed four hours - the entire live-fire day - because her volunteer department ran a working structure fire that morning. She completed every other hour and passed every written and practical evaluation. She is also the fire chief's daughter. Your roster goes to the state certifying agency, which requires 100 percent attendance for the practical hours. Training records are kept in the division office. Two weeks later, an attorney for an injured firefighter requests all training records from a class you taught last year, and while pulling files you find an old sign-in sheet where one signature appears to cover two names.
1. How do you handle J's missing live-fire hours and the chief's relationship to her?
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I cannot certify hours she did not attend, and the relationship makes a clean record more important, not less. First I check the state rule and the approved course plan for whether make-up sessions are permitted and what they must contain - usually a supervised, evaluated make-up of the live-fire performance objectives.
If make-up is allowed, I schedule it, document the date, supervising instructor, and evaluation results, and submit the roster reflecting completed hours. If it is not allowed within this cycle, she receives an incomplete and takes the live-fire block in the next cycle.
What I will not do is record hours she did not attend. That is a falsified training record, and it jeopardizes her certification, my instructor credential, and the agency. I would give the chief the same answer in writing that I would give any student's officer, which is the only version of this conversation that survives review.
2. What is the correct handling of the attorney's records request?
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The request goes to whoever owns the records - the training division or the agency's records custodian - not to me as an informal handoff. Before anything is released I verify the request is in writing and properly scoped, confirm with counsel and the custodian what must be produced and what is protected, and produce only what is requested. Personnel and medical information is typically redacted, and student records may carry their own protections. I log exactly what was produced, to whom, and when.
If I am subpoenaed rather than asked, I do not decide - counsel does, and I preserve originals in place. The instinct should be cooperative but not unilateral. The instructor's job is to be a reliable custodian of the record, not the person who decides what is discoverable.
3. You found a sign-in sheet where one signature appears to cover two names. What do you do, and what do you never do?
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An altered or borrowed signature is a documentation integrity problem, and the fix is never to tidy the sheet. I leave the original exactly as found. I pull the class file and establish who was actually present from independent evidence - evaluations, instructor notes, other rosters - and I write down what I found and when I found it.
Then I report it to the training division administrator, who determines whether the record is corrected by a dated, signed addendum that states what was corrected and why. I never backdate, replace, or re-copy the original sheet. If a student's completion is in question, the hours get re-verified rather than assumed.
The standard is simple: the record has to survive a deposition. An unexplained alteration is worse than the original error, because it turns a clerical problem into a credibility problem.