“This is our 22nd annual Blaine Safety Camp. This year, we are focusing on a variety of different safety topics: everything from fire safety to internet safety to water safety, to self control,” Hunt said Andrea Hunt, Crime Prevention Specialist for the Blaine Police Department. “We’re covering a variety of different topics in two different days.”
“Unintentional injury is the leading cause of death for kids this age and we feel like this is a really good age, a target age for us to still send them some pretty strong messages while they’re still a sponge and will suck it up,” she said.
Safety Camp covers issues most people would be concerned about like fire and injury prevention, but something Safety Camp is starting to incorporate more of is internet safety.
“What we do is we kind of look at some stats of what’s sending our kids to the emergency in our areas and we reach out to them and say, ‘how are kids getting hurt, and what messages do we need to get across to them?’ Now internet safety isn’t going to land you in the emergency room per se, but it’s also a topic that we at the police department, and I personally, have a strong feeling about. I feel like this is going to be the thing that hurts our kids as we move forward and the technology changes and the access changes,” Hunt said.
Although the camp is only two days, Hunt hopes these lessons last well into adulthood.
“This third to fourth grade age is a great age for us to give them some very positive messages, but yet make it very interactive and fun at the same time,” she said. “We’ve learned after doing this for so many years that they keep these messages, I have run into different kids along the way that are now in their twenties and they can say, ‘I was at Safety Camp, I remember,’ and they will remember a variety of different topics that we talked about… that they did when they were eight and nine years old.”
At the end of Safety Camp there was an awards ceremony where the kids learned their camp counselors are really police officers and firefighter in their neighborhoods. There was emergency vehicles on display and campers received medals and certificates.
