(Picture credit Andrew Coates)
Nebraska and local leaders are speaking out against the city of Fremont following a national firestorm sparked when its municipal fire department rejected a homeschooled volunteer firefighter’s application for a career firefighter opening.
As WOWT originally reported last week, 22-year-old Cedar Bluffs volunteer firefighter Andrew Coates was told that because his homeschooling high school was unaccredited that he did not meet the educational requirements for a firefighter opening, despite having earned his state EMT license and being vouched for with glowing praise from his fire chief.
The controversy has since lit up the national stage with WOWT’s original reporting being relayed by other local news outlets nationwide. Meanwhile homeschooling advocates and concerned political leaders are decrying what they see as a baffling ruling, while holding out hope for a quick resolution at the city level and possible legislative remedies to prevent similar incidents in the future.
“I strongly disagree of the decision made by the City of Fremont,” Governor Jim Pillen told The Plains Sentinel. “Andrew Coates has already proven his commitment to public safety by serving as a volunteer firefighter. Nebraskans who are qualified and eager to serve their communities should not be turned away simply because of their educational background. We should be encouraging young leaders like Coates, not turning them away. My administration will be investigating ways to remedy this situation.”
State Treasurer Joey Spellerberg told The Plains Sentinel he was “encouraged to hear” that the mayor and members of the city council “are actively working on a solution to the City’s policy.”
“Having confirmed many firefighters during my tenure, I know firsthand how critical it is to recruit and retain dedicated talent,” Spellerberg, a former mayor of Fremont, told The Plains Sentinel.
“The current applicant already holds an active, state-certified EMT license and carries proven, real-world experience as a volunteer firefighter in Cedar Bluffs. Homeschool students are among the most disciplined, hard-working, and highly capable individuals in our community, and ensuring our hiring standards recognize their valuable contributions only strengthens our emergency services.”
“I trust city leaders will act decisively to find a common-sense solution that ensures Fremont continues its strong growth and leadership as one of Nebraska’s fastest growing communities,” Spellerberg concluded.
Both Congressman Mike Flood and U.S. Senator Pete Ricketts weighed in as well.
“Homeschooled Nebraskans make great contributions to our state and grow up to become leaders in our communities,” Flood, whose congressional district includes Fremont, told The Plains Sentinel in a statement. “Fremont is a fantastic place to live because city leadership is investing in the future of the community, and I have no doubt they will find a commonsense solution that gives homeschool graduates like Andrew an opportunity to serve their neighbors.”
“I’ve been fortunate to have homeschool graduates as invaluable members of my team. It’s terrible that this has happened to Andrew. Nebraska’s firefighters—volunteer and paid—are critical to keeping our communities safe. I’m hopeful for a resolution that ensures homeschooled Nebraskans who complied with our state’s education laws can continue to serve as first responders,” Ricketts told The Plains Sentinel in a statement.
Legal, Policy Actions Being Considered
In the meanwhile, however, homeschool advocates tell The Plains Sentinel they are primed to push for legislative changes to prevent similar situations in the future.
“Homeschool graduates in Nebraska do not deserve to have their education treated as 2nd class when studies show homeschool students typically score 15-25 percent above public school students on standardized testing,” the legislative affairs team for Nebraska Christian Home Educators Association (NCHEA) told The Plains Sentinel in a statement.
NCHEA “advocates on behalf of Nebraska homeschoolers and has already written a draft bill to change the law in Nebraska to address this issue,” the legislative team said in a statement, noting if policies like Fremont Fire Department’s were to stand, a significant pool of talented young Nebraskans would be closed off from the fire service.
“It is likely the city did not realize that by changing their education requirement to stipulate ‘accredited’ high school that they are also excluding graduates from many other schools in Nebraska that are designated as approved or exempt rather than accredited,” NCHEA noted, adding that according to state education department data as of June 2026 that would include a total of 78 nonpublic accredited schools and 94 approved but not accredited schools. “This accounts for approximately 5% of all school age children in Nebraska,” the NCHEA analysts calculate.
Additionally, the Home School Legal Defense Association, the nation’s leading legal defense organization for homeschoolers, told The Plains Sentinel it is “actively” looking at “legal and policy solutions.”
But aside from the accreditation and legal issues, observers with decades in firefighting experience say Coates’ performance as a volunteer firefighter and EMT should have shown Fremont Fire Department that he was a capable candidate to consider.
“I have spent more than 50 years in this service, and I have watched departments of every size, career and volunteer, fight to fill seats that once filled themselves. Here was a qualified young man standing at the station door with a license in his hand, and a city closed the door on him over a piece of paper,” observes Fred R. LaPoint, a fire chief and creator of a Substack called “Behind the Alarm.”
“I’ll leave the legal question to the lawyers. Call it discrimination or call it something else; the outcome doesn’t change,” LaPoint wrote in a Sept. 19 post. “A licensed EMT with volunteer fire experience was turned away from a paid department over the word ‘accredited,’ and that word appeared in the job description only after he was rejected.”
LaPoint concluded that a diploma doesn’t tell you much about a firefighter’s chops, but there are plenty of tests and training regimen that do.
“[T]he fire service has spent generations building better ways to find out whether a candidate can do this job than asking who signed his diploma. We have written entrance exams and physical ability tests. We have oral boards, background investigations and medical evaluations to NFPA 1582. We have conditional offers of employment, recruit academies that wash out people who can’t keep up, and probationary periods measured in months. Every one of those tests the person. A diploma tests only the paper, and a department has many chances to verify qualifications and fitness to serve long after a conditional offer is made,” LaPoint writes.
For his part, Dave Wordekemper would agree.
“Had Mr. Coates been given the opportunity to take the [civil service] exam, any questions about the sufficiency of his high school education would probably have been resolved, and the issue of accredited or non-accredited diplomas would not have come up,” Wordekemper, a career firefighter and the Republican state senator whose district includes Fremont, tells The Plains Sentinel. “I am hopeful that the parties can reach a satisfactory resolution. I also hope that this incident does not discourage anyone from considering the fire service as a career in Fremont or elsewhere in Nebraska.”
Cedar Bluffs fire chief Chris Lichtenberg, who testified before the Fremont Civil Service Commission on Coates’ behalf, recalled in an email to The Plains Sentinel the ways he believes Coates has stood out in just two years in the fire service.
“Andrew has been with the Cedar Bluffs Suburban Fire District for right around 2 years. While he was very new to the fire service when he started, he has taken numerous classes through Metro Community College and currently is Firefighter 1, Firefighter 2, Hazmat Operations, and National Registry EMT certified. He was named ‘Rookie of the Year’ during our 2025 Fire Department Banquet. Andrew is a great asset on our department as he is very active and makes most calls. He is always eager to learn new things and takes part in all of the training that he can get,” Lichtenberg said.
Lichtenberg, who also serves as sheriff of Saunders County, also told The Plains Sentinel he’s observed similar competence and leadership traits on the job from homeschooled deputies he’s supervised.
“What the news didn’t show is that I also mentioned that as the Saunders County Sheriff, if Andrew decided to change his life path, that I would be honored to take his application for a deputy position. Saunders County currently employs two deputies that were homeschooled, and they both are two of my top producing deputies when I look at their stats. They both have a great work ethic and are great assets to our department,” Lichtenberg said.
LaPoint sees policy lessons for fire chiefs, whom he argues should not completely outsource key recruiting strategy to HR officers.
“[E]very chief should know whether a candidate like Andrew could be screened out of their department without the chief ever seeing his name,” LaPoint writes, calling for “build[ing] a second road in” to a line of work that historically struggles with recruitment.
“A homeschool diploma paired with a transcript, a standardized test score or a professional license is a reasonable path. So is simply letting your entrance exam do its job. The goal is to test the candidate, not to sort him by where he sat when he learned algebra.”
LaPoint concluded:
“I understand some people have honest concerns about homeschooling, and that debate has its place in education policy. It doesn’t belong at the station door. By the time a young man like Andrew gets there, the questions that matter are whether he can learn the job, do the job, and be trusted with the public. The fire service has good tools for answering all three. Fremont didn’t use them.”
City Council to Take Action
Following initial reporting by The Plains Sentinel, the Fremont City Council announced it will consider a resolution to update city human resources policy to permit hiring individuals whose high-school education was completed through unaccredited schools, such as homeschool graduates.
Sponsored by Councilman Paul Von Behren, Resolution 2026-256 would, if passed, amend “the City hiring policy by changing the minimum qualifications for applicants to accept high school graduates from non-accredited schools and directs Staff to implement the amended policy for all applicants, including but not limited to civil service employees.”
Fremont City Council member Sally Ganem told The Plains Sentinel that she and the mayor were supportive of the resolution.
An appended staff report says that the city’s existing city policy is based in part on concerns over legal liability.
“Without widely acknowledged standards or measurement, there is no standardized diploma or certificate to show the level of academic achievement for those completing exempt or approved education. Given that fact, the City of Fremont has elected not to consider applicants without an accredited high school diploma or G.E.D. (high school equivalency), citing potential liability risks in hiring individuals without education ‘certification,’” the staff report memo notes.
“In both the public and private sectors, it is common for all lawfully issued high school diplomas to be given equal footing, especially given the many examples of exempt and approved school graduates going on to high levels of academic and professional achievement,” the staff report memo adds.
“Beyond our hiring process, there are other options to manage risk. Those would include but are certainly not limited to: probationary employment, annual performance reviews, basic competency testing, skills training, prior training, prior experience and skills Testing,” the memo continues.
“The purpose of this resolution is to revise our current HR hiring policy to acknowledge and accept lawfully issued high school diplomas to fulfill high school-level education requirements for city jobs.”
If the resolution passes, Coates would be able to re-apply when an opening occurs, but as of publication time there are no current openings listed with Fremont Fire Department on the city’s employment opportunities page.
An investigation by The Plains Sentinel found that Coates’ father, Seth Coates, had protested five separate times before the Fremont City Council over the “discrimination” against his son between April and August. The board appeared unmoved until the public outcry in the past week.
— Ken Shepherd is a freelance reporter with The Plains Sentinel. He is a former editor at Fox News Digital and the Washington Times.
This smells like teacher's union interference to me. If a paid firefighting unit has all these tests, from written to physical, I don't see why it should matter how a person earned their high school education.
On the other hand, I could totally see how the teacher's union would want to back door control something like this - make it a requirement to have a public school diploma or GED to keep kids in their schools, and keep those tax dollars flowing to them
There was reporting that the education requirements for the job was changed during Coates' application. Who changed the language and when did they change it? How long has that requirement really existed?