By Audrey Levine Staff Writer
The flame of victory is burning brightly for Hillsborough’s three winners after its first township participation in a statewide fire safety poster competition.
The Hillsborough Fire Department awarded prizes March 11 to three fourth-graders for their work on posters demonstrating fire safety, and sent first-place winner Katrina Macaro’s entry to be judged at the state level.
”This contest has been statewide for a number of years,” said Hillsborough Chief Fire Marshal Chris Weniger. “I made the push this year for us to be involved.”
According to Peggy Cioce, district visual performing arts supervisor, members of the Fire Department approached her about participating in the competition, and she presented it to elementary school art teachers to get the children involved.
”My son is a firefighter and I was more than willing to help them out,” she said.
The contest which is sponsored by the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs Division of Fire Safety and the New Jersey State Fire Prevention and Protection Association is broken into categories for several different age groups, but Ms. Cioce said Hillsborough chose to only offer it to grades three through five for this year.
Chief Weniger said that this year’s contest theme was “Practice Your Escape Plan,” and the 156 participants from the township’s elementary schools sent in entries about making plans and practicing them with their families.
”We were looking for a poster that best showed the theme,” he said. “All of the winners had the theme emblazoned on the front and showed what we thought was a good description.”
After deliberation by Chief Weniger’s office and Fire Commissioner Ron Berju, three winners were chosen for the first, second and third places in Hillsborough.
For her poster, Katrina, a fourth-grader at Sunnymead Elementary School, said she drew family members practicing an escape plan while the mother checked to see how quickly they could exit the building, an idea she got from watching her school principal time fire drills. As the first-place winner in Hillsborough, she won both a $100 gift certificate and a ride to school in the township firetruck.
”I felt very excited and very giddy at first, thinking I would be in second or third place,” she said. “And I am very excited about the ride in the firetruck.”
Chief Weniger said that if Katrina’s poster is chosen in her category by the state, she will also receive a personal DELL computer system. If she wins the grand prize, he said, her poster will be printed and distributed to school districts around the state.
A $50 gift certificate was awarded to second-place winner Sunnymead Elementary School fourth-grader Julia Vanzini. Coming in third, and receiving a $25 gift certificate to Toys ‘R’ Us, was Amsterdam Elementary School fourth-grader Catherine Schenfeld.
According to contest rules, Ms. Cioce said, participants could only use four colors on their posters, and could not include television or movie cartoon characters, among other rules of the contest. She said posters were judged on originality, clarity of message and design.
For Julia, she said she was unsure what she initially wanted to draw on her poster, but the image eventually took shape as she drew it, becoming a person climbing out a window onto a ladder to escape a fire.
”At first, I had no clue what to draw, so I started out with a sketch of a person,” she said. “The person was supposed to be walking, but turned out looking like she was climbing.”
Catherine said she chose to make her poster a dream sequence with a family imagining their plan, as she drew a cartoon bubble over the heads of the family members, with their means of escape floating inside the bubble.
Ms. Cioce said, the posters, once submitted, were all hung in the municipal building where they were judged. The community also had the opportunity to view the work submitted, although each poster was anonymous, she said, so as not to sway the judges.
”Fire safety is an important issue,” she said. “The students were able to show their understanding of fire safety in an artistically creative way.”
Chief Weniger said the results from the statewide competition should be available in mid-May, but, for now, he is hoping the success of this year’s township competition will entice more students to participate next year.
”Anytime we can get the fire safety message into day-to-day lives is a good thing,” he said. “I hope the kids will tell others what they did this year and it will spur interest.”