When fire departments plan fire-safety campaigns for their communities, they typically don’t reach a good portion of the population. Why? Because 14 percent of adults in the United States have either low literacy skills or none at all. As a result, these people can’t understand campaign materials, and they are often at high risk for home fires.
In February 2005, FireRescue reported on a new fire-safety education initiative targeted at low-literacy adults called the Home Safety Literacy Project. The Home Safety Council has since been distributing the project’s free kits to local fire departments and literacy programs. But the kit itself is not the only groundbreaking component. “We didn’t just want new materials,” explains Meri-K Appy, president of the Home Safety Council. “[We wanted] a new process for getting them into the right at-risk homes and schools. That’s why we partnered with local fire departments and literacy programs.” A teacher in a literacy program can help identify not only low-level readers, but also those who do not have smoke alarms in their homes or evacuation plans in case of fire.
The kit is designed to be taught by a literacy teacher, a fire department educator or both. Appy recommends that fire departments partner with literacy programs. “Literacy teachers have a trusting relationship with these people,” she explains.
A Success Story
The City of Plano (Texas) Fire Department (CPFD) served as a test site for the project in fall 2004, and it’s still using the kit. “It was a quality program from the beginning,” says Peggy Harrell, fire safety education coordinator for the CPFD. “You could tell a lot of work went into it up front.”
The CPFD partnered with Even Start, a local family literacy program, to teach the fire safety lessons included in the kit. Harrell estimates that 95 percent of the 40 families in Even Start are non-English speakers. “You think they’re there to learn to read,” she says, “but there was such interest, such enthusiasm and such ownership of these lessons, because this was going to make their homes and their families safer.”
Harrell says the lessons in the kit-which focus on the dangers of smoke, the importance of smoke alarms and how to practice home fire drills-lend themselves to expansion. “We got into other fire-safety issues with the class,” she recalls. One issue involved the importance of fire extinguishers. Under the CPFD’s encouragement, a local Lowe’s hardware store donated a free fire extinguisher to each family participating in the program. The students were trained on how to use the extinguishers, and Harrell performed home visits to install smoke alarms, witness fire drills and place the extinguishers in each student’s home.
“We even had a save come out of this,” says Harrell. In April 2004, about four months after Harrell’s home visit, one student was at home when a kitchen fire broke out in her neighbor’s house. “The neighbor was running around and didn’t know what to do,” Harrell explains. “The student grabbed her extinguisher, went over there and put out the fire. She said without the class, she too would have been running around panicking.”
Getting the Word Out
Appy reports that a second phase of the Home Safety Literacy Project will begin in March, offering a second kit that includes materials on disaster preparedness. “This will give the fire service a good role to play in educating members of their community,” Appy says. “The kit has basic information; we broke it down into [two sections:] what to have [inside] a ready-to-stay kit and [what to have in] a ready-to-go kit.”
You can download the entire first-phase Fire Safety Literacy Project kit from the project Web site at www.firesafetyliteracyproject.org. Fire-safety educators can receive a hard copy of the kit by signing up online to join the Expert Network, the Home Safety Council’s free online resource for fire- and life-safety educators, at www.homesafetycouncil.org/expertnetwork. “When we get a grant to create new materials, we ask for additional money so we can distribute the finished materials to our Expert Network,” Appy says. “We have more than 3,000 fire departments in the network already, [and it’s] growing fast. I think it’s because of the Home Safety Literacy Project.”
