TRAVERSE CITY -- The Blair Elementary School mascot may be a bobcat but the school's teachers and students are really pioneers.
The Risk Watch program is debuting there, the first school in the state to launch the curriculum linking teachers and parents with community safety experts.
Kicking off last week with two half-days of training for Blair teachers, Risk Watch involves a variety of partners, including Grand Traverse Metro and Rural, Blair Township, Peninsula Township and Traverse City fire departments.
Other participating organizations are Safe Kids North Shore, North Flight Grand Traverse, The Prescription Shops/Whitney Health Care Services, Tart Trails and American Red Cross of Northwest Michigan. Law enforcement weighs in with the Traverse City Police Department, Grand Traverse Sheriff's Department and the Michigan State Police.
The depth and breadth of this list will boost the school-based curriculum, which is geared to children ages 14 and under. The Risk Watch coalition provides experts to serve as resources for teachers and students.
A grant from State Farm Insurance allowed the state to begin training the Risk Watch trainers: schoolteachers. After the pilot site at Blair is up and running, the program will be rolled out to other local schools.
"It takes a complete partnership to put this program together and this partnership here is very strong," said Ronald Farr, the state fire marshal, during an inaugural training session held Wednesday at Wilderness Crossings. "We all need to do all we can to reduce fire and fatalities as well as all the other injuries we can prevent."
Topics that will be covered with students in age-appropriate teaching modules span the safety gamut: fire and burn prevention, motor vehicle safety, falls prevention, firearm injury prevention, water safety, bike and pedestrian safety and prevention of strangulation, suffocation or poisoning.
The motivations behind Risk Watch are statistics showing that unintentional injuries annually kill more than 6,000 kids and permanently disable 120,000 more.
"That's why we're here today, to talk about the reality of childhood injury and what can we do as a community at large and a school community to prevent them," said Meredith Hawes, fire and life safety public educator with the Grand Traverse Metro Fire Department. "Injuries are not just accidents, they're often very predictable and preventable incidences."
Risk Watch is not a new program but it is new to Michigan. Successful implementations in other states provide incentives for more to adopt the prevention training.
"I have seen the program really take off in a lot of areas and save both lives and money," said Terry Campbell, a public education adviser with the National Fire Prevention Association, which developed Risk Watch.
Complementing the Michigan model, the Risk Watch curriculum can be presented to students in about an hour a month, with each month dedicated to a different topic.
"Risk Watch is fun, it's fun in the classroom for kids," said Hawes, noting the program's information activities target different learning styles and multiple intelligences.
For more information on Risk Watch, call Meredith Hawes at 947-3000, ext. 1234.
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