Safety for Children

Proving that Amber Alerts do indeed work, a child in Florida was found after a tip was sent in to police from a citizen who saw the Amber Alert.  There are many critics of the system, but when you hear stories such as this, it is hard to deny that it does good.

Authorities say a Bartow boy who has been missing since Monday has been found in South Florida. An anonymous tipster contacted the Hialeah Police Department on Wednesday night, saying they had spotted a car that matched information from an Amber Alert issued for 6-year-old Ar’Marion Hargrove.

Hialeah police located the white four-door Chevrolet Impala that the tipster saw and found the child with 25-year-old Charles Hargrove. Authorities say Ar’Marion Hargrove will be returned to his mother.

Do you believe the school bus driver that picks up your children in the morning is a safe one? A bus driver in Tennessee was recently charged with driving under the influence of painkillers and reckless endangerment of a child after passing out at the wheel when driving 30 students home from school. School districts have strict rules over the hiring of bus drivers, but it was discovered recently that many do not follow the guidelines.

According to federal law, bus drivers must have a commercial driver’s license. Other regulations vary by state and by district, but they all require criminal background checks as well as random drug and alcohol testing. The problem is, some states don’t play by the rules.

"We found all kinds of district personnel who had no idea that there were federal regulations," said Susan Montee, who performed an audit of 30 districts looking at 435 drivers.

She found that nearly 70 of them were not in compliance and districts often failed to run criminal background checks, or drug tests or even meet training requirements.

A check with your school district on the enforcement of these regulations could go a long way into making sure your

child is as safe as possible when on a school bus

.

Newsday.com has some really great tips about your child’s safety during Halloween. Some of the tips might be things we wouldn’t normally think of such as what kind of candy children with braces can eat and how to help children who wear eyeglasses be safe with masks.

Kids with braces need to avoid nuts, caramels, jelly beans, hard pretzels, bubble gum and frozen candy bars, says Dr. Richard Faber, an orthodontist in Melville and director of the advanced program in orthodontics at Stony Brook University’s School of Medicine.

Every year some children will plead with their parents not to make them wear their prescription glasses with their costumes because they think it will ruin the effect, says Dr. Steven Schiff, an optometrist in private practice in Deer Park.

Parents need to put their foot down, he says. "It’s a safety issue." Kids may be out at night, and they need to be able to see well, he says.

Keeping your children safe in our ever growing global environment is becoming tougher and tougher for parents, especially with children having access to the internet. There is a new service out there called Instant Amber that allows you to store all of your child’s vital information online in case they go missing. Newsguide.us outlines the unique service for parents who want to store their child’s info in a format they’ll always have access to.

InstantAmber is a web-based gathering, storage, and delivery service that enables law enforcement to retrieve critical data and photos in the event of a missing child emergency. InstantAmber.com was the first online data storage product that was designed to transfer vital information to law enforcement in the case of a situation requiring a nationwide Amber Alert. InstantAmber was created, with help from law enforcement, to make sure that all necessary information will be captured, which ensures that a missing child’s information is available to law enforcement within minutes, instead of hours. InstantAmber.com also includes useful parenting resources and tools that will help ensure that a child doesn’t become another statistic.

InstantAmber.com has more information on the service.