Student, Staff Member Put Out Fire at Kennedy H.S.

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa - Quick thinking by a student and staff member kept a fire from doing much damage at Cedar Rapids Kennedy High School Tuesday morning.

Cedar Rapids Firefighters say a fluorescent light in the school's weight room failed and sparked a small fire. A picture of the sparks falling from the light is now circulating on social media. No one was in the weight room when it happened.

The school and firefighters say a student and staff member at the school grabbed a fire extinguisher and put out the small fire before firefighters arrived.

That student is Brady Christensen. He told TV9 at first he didn't believe there was a fire, until he went to investigate and saw the flames. Christensen says he yelled at another student to pull the fire alarm, then ran to get a fire extinguisher.

'Anybody in my position would hopefully have done the same thing,” said Christensen. 'There's two responses. You either get scared or you do something about it and that's how I was raised, react to what's going on.”

The school says there is a lot of smoke in the area of the weight room and classes in that area were moved to other parts of the building.

Students were back in their classrooms about 15-minutes after the fire alarm.