TEACHERS LEARN FIRE PREVENTION

Cape Girardeau preschoolers will have a better chance to avoid injury in a fire following a fire prevention workshop for about 100 of their teachers.

Cape Girardeau is one of eight communities in the nation to have received the educational program sponsored by Bic.

The Bic company has provided 300 educational kits for use in Cape Girardeau child-care programs in addition to the workshop.

The company selects eight communities a year to receive the program and kits. Cape Girardeau applied through the Educare program.

Dr. Robert Cole, a psychologist at the University of Rochester, N.Y., has been studying children and fires since the early 1980s.

Children, especially preschoolers, are responsible for setting fires every day. Most are set as a child plays with matches or a lighter.

"They just don't understand or misunderstand fire," Cole said. "They think fire is small, like a birthday candle, and fragile. They can just blow it out. They think big fires are hard to start, like the barbecue grill or the fireplace."

Over the past 12 years, Cole and his research partners have studied hundreds of children, what they know about fire and why they have set fires.

Armed with the data and with help from the Rochester Fire Department and Bic, Cole developed educational kits for preschoolers to teach fire safety.

The program has four objectives.

It teaches children that firefighters are their friends and they should go to a firefighter in an emergency. "A firefighter in full gear can be very unsettling for a child," Cole said. "And tragically, kids will hide."

Children are also taught to crawl under the smoke to the outside. "We don't want to put too much responsibility on a young child, but this is something they can do to buy time in an emergency," Cole said. Every year, more people are killed by smoke than flames in house fires.

Children are taught to stop, drop and roll if their clothing catches fire, and they are taught that matches and lighters are adult tools. If children see matches or lighters, they are supposed to tell an adult.

The educational kits include high-quality production videos with animation, music and a Dalmatian. It also includes story cards, games, books and teacher's guides for discussion with children.

In Rochester, this educational program teamed with an intervention program through the fire department resulted in an 82 percent decrease in repeat fire setting by children over a six-year period.

In 1991, Bic developed a child-resistant disposable lighter, which later became mandatory in the industry. But the company recognized that the lighter wasn't childproof. It teamed up with Cole to sponsor educational workshops, like the one in Cape Girardeau.