What They Bought With the Grant:

• Enhancement and Expansion of a Fire Prevention Program

How the Grant Has Helped:

Children playing with fire cause hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries each year. Preschoolers are most likely to start these fires, typically by playing with matches and lighters. Children playing with fire caused an estimated 13,900 structure fires in 2002, resulting in 210 deaths, 1250 injuries and $339 million in direct damage. Most of the people killed in child-playing fires are under the age of 5. Although children under 5 make up about 7% of the country's population, they accounted for 14% of home fire deaths – a risk of twice the national average. In addition, children in low-income families are at particularly high risk. Studies show poverty is the single most important factor related to unintentional injuries in children. Children from low-income families have been found to be five times more likely to die in a fire.

Fireproof Children/Prevention First Company in Rochester , New York received a 2004 Fire Prevention and Safety grant to expand the reach of Prevention First Fire Safety Education for Preschool Children and Families. Two previous AFG grants had enabled the company to develop the program and distribute it to states with high rates of fire-related injuries and deaths for children.

By 2008, more than 4,204,000 people will have benefited from Prevention First Fire Safety programs funded by AFG grants, at a total Federal share cost of 41 cents per person. This is due to the sustainability and durability built into Prevention First Fire Safety. Through train-the-trainer workshops, Head Start and other preschool managers and teachers gain knowledge of effective fire safety education. They then disseminate training and materials in their local communities, and do so for years to come.

Materials are either highly durable and continue to be used year after year, or produced to be easily replicable. The framework of the training is the award-winning play safe! be safe! ® multi-media classroom kit, created by BIC Corporation working with Fireproof Children. The play safe! Program has been evaluated and shown to be effective in teaching young children key fire safety skills including Stop Drop and Roll, Crawl Low Under Smoke, Go to the Firefighter, and Go Tell a Grown-up/ Matches and Lighters Are Adult Tools Only.

So that each child receiving the Prevention First classroom program will take home its life-saving messages, Fireproof Children developed parent/child activity materials. These materials incorporate visual illustrations, with minimal written directions in both English and Spanish. They contain activities parents can do with their children such as making sure their home has a working smoke alarm, checking for household hazards, putting matches and lighters out of sight and reach, and having and practicing an exit plan with a meeting place.

To bring home safety messages in a more durable form, Fireproof Children also created Mikey Makes a Mess , an English / Spanish storybook parents can read with their children. Mikey is a little boy who likes to leave his things exactly where he wants them—in the middle of the floor. But then Mikey's daddy leaves out something he shouldn't—a packet of matches. Both learn there are some things that shouldn't be left lying around.

Besides teaching kids that matches and lighters are adult tools only, the book reminds parents that picking up clutter and keeping pathways clear is a good preparedness technique for any emergency. More than 130,000 copies of Mikey Makes a Mess have been distributed nationwide.

Evaluation of these workshops over three years has found they increase the participants' knowledge of fire safety, intention to include fire safety in the curriculum, and confidence in their ability to teach fire safety to young children.

A random sample of workshop participants trained in 2004 found that 97% of the teachers they went on to train had used the play safe! kit in their classroom; 80% had presented all four lessons from play safe! ; 88% had distributed the home safety activities to parents; and 82% of families reported finding the activities useful. Documentation from schools which received play safe! kits 10 years ago show they are still using the program in their classrooms, validating the sustainability of the program.

Between 2004 and 2005, Prevention First Fire Safety programs distributed 20,883 smoke alarms and vocal smoke alarms, primarily to families in low-income areas who were inadequately protected. A number of research studies involving household visits and direct observation have found that only 50% of such low-income households have working smoke alarms.

Smoke alarms cut the chance of dying in a residential fire in half. The 2004 AFG grant, along with funding from Ultralife Batteries, Inc. and SignalONE Safety, Inc., allowed us to evaluate the outcomes of the Prevention First smoke alarm distribution. We found that 72% of homes which received the smoke alarms still had them installed and operational a full year after installation, as confirmed by visual inspection by fire service.

For more information about Prevention First Fire Safety Education for Preschool Children and Families, visit www.fireproofchildren.com.

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