OLD BRIDGE — Every member of the family has a role to play when preparing for emergencies like superstorm Sandy, including young children, according to FEMA spokesman Albert Pillot.
Pillot was one of several FEMA representatives on hand April 11 at the second FEMA for Kids event at Cooper Elementary School, where students worked hand in hand with nearly a dozen AmeriCorps volunteers to practice emergency preparedness.
“The mission of FEMA for Kids is to teach kids the basic components of emergency preparedness,” Pillot said. “We teach them to be ready, make a plan, make a kit and how to distinguish important tools and resources.”
That knowledge is particularly useful for the pupils at Cooper School, where the Raritan Bay meets a densely populated suburban landscape about half-a-mile away, according to Principal Susanne Miskiewicz.
“When we had [superstorm Sandy], this area of Old Bridge was hit hard. This school was the last school that was able to open up [in town] because we had no power. … There was stuff floating all over the place, and the kids that live over here suffered,” she said.
Next time around, Miskiewicz wants her students to be prepared, she said.
“What they learn now is one thing, but what’s most important is that they think of these things in the future,” she said.
FEMA for Kids provides an education that, at its core, has similar components to the education FEMA provides for adults. The difference, Pillot said, lies in the methods used to relate to elementary school-aged children and convey the importance of their role in the family.
Volunteers with AmeriCorps act as instructors in the program because they are well-versed in emergency-preparedness education and are able to overcome the barriers typically inherent in teacher-student relationships, according to Thomas Trapene, Americorps team leader.
“We’re a volunteer community service organization. We merged the National Civilian Community Corps with FEMA, and we got FEMA Corps. We’re a group of 18- to 24-year-olds that comes together to do 10 months of community service across the U.S. Everyone signed up to be here because they wanted to,” Trapene said.
Instructors guide students through a series of work stations, teaching them how to determine which household items would be useful in an emergency, how to establish an emergency contact list and how to handle a variety of post-emergency situations, among other things.
At one station, FEMA Corps volunteers helped students navigate a computer game that challenged them to head through each room of a home and gather supplies during an evacuation scenario. The goal was to avoid choosing items that are too big to transport or not useful in an emergency situation.
“Maybe one day, they’ll say, ‘Dad, we need this,’ or ‘Mom, I remember we might need this,’ ” Pillot said. “It’s something that kids will hopefully remember in the future.”
At another station, volunteers used hand puppets and stuffed animals to show students how to care for their pets during an emergency and how to approach stray animals after a storm.
“These are the types of things that kids can identify with,” Pillot said.
The program has to tread a careful line to ensure that it does not instill fear in the young children, though.
“We keep things simple and basic with stuff that they can relate to. We’re not showing them films, we don’t show them people struggling — that would definitely scare them,” he said.
Knowing how to react to emergency situations helps ensure that kids can avoid acting in fear if those situations come to pass, Miskiewicz said.
“It’s really about making sure our kids are being proactive rather than reactive,” she said.