A couple of weeks ago, Jimmy and I attended a meeting at Madi's school, and I feel the overwhelming need to share this organization and their message with you.
KidSafe is a prevention education program that provides an alternative for our children to the "stranger danger" message of the past. The reason--70% of child exploitation and molestation happens from people known to a child. Scary, huh? 1 in 3 girls and 1 in 6 boys will be exploited before the age of 18, most often by a trusted adult that they know and love.
Yuck. Let me take a moment to clear my mind before I vomit.
The KidSafe program teaches children, beginning at a young age, a variety of lessons over an 8-week period, including: safe and unsafe touch/body boundaries, circle of safe adults, check first, safety first reporting and the buddy system.
The parent meeting was a real eye-opener. While the founder promised not to scare our children during their lessons, she revealed that her job was to scare the heck out of us. And she did. The statistics of abuse are staggering, and the odds are definitely stacked against our children. There were only 9 parents present at the meeting, which saddens me. I wish more of the parents could have been there to hear about the amazing training our children are receiving over an 8-week course.
The most incredible part--to me--is that a set of Kindergarten parents anonymously donated the program to the Kindergarten classes (and maybe more classes, I'm not sure...).
10 classes x 18 kids per class (avg) x $26.00 per child
I'd say that's a pretty generous act of goodwill. I sure wish we knew who to thank for protecting our children. But since we don't, we'll just have to thank God for people like that in this world. We feel pretty blessed. Based on the odds, that means a lot of children might be spared from harm. I wish more schools would enlist KidSafe to "arm" the children.
The KidSafe Foundation also has a couple of children's books to reinforce their lessons. We will definitely own those for the kids. For more information about the KidSafe Program, please visit their website: www.kidsafefoundation.org or call them at (855) 844-SAFE.
1 comment:
Hi Lisa,
I heard this is an amazing program. We tried to get it for our school, but it was very expensive and we could not get the funding. The town would not pay for it and lots of parents in our town would never spend the money. I wish I had enough money to fund it myself. I hope you are all doing well. Our next reunion is in Connecticut on August 18th. Would love to see all of you, but totally understand if you were not able to come.
Karen
Post a Comment