Learning to save lives

The stories are grim. Stories like that of a 14-year-old autistic boy in Philadelphia who died two years ago in a house fire. His sister was in the middle of guiding him out of the house when he ran back upstairs in fear.

There wasn’t enough time to save him.

Another young boy in Missouri met a similar fate in 2007 when he locked himself in a bathroom in an attempt to find a safe place in the middle of a blaze.

The list of stories like theirs is gravely long, said Libby Pittman, a speech pathologist at Crestline Elementary School in Mountain Brook. She said manageable emergencies are a real danger for children with sensory sensitivity, who don’t know how to cope with alarms.

And oftentimes schools aren’t doing much to help, she said. When it comes time for fire drills, many schools protect the sensory sensitive from the drill itself instead of teaching them to protect themselves correctly from the danger.

“I spoke at a speech pathology conference [a while back] and asked them to fill out a quick little survey,” Pittman said. “It just asked them if they forewarned their children about the alarm, if they take them out of the building before the drill or if they make them go through it.”

Seventy percent of the teachers who took the survey said they either removed the children from the drill or forewarned them about it, Pittman said.

“It seems prevalent that well-meaning teachers just want to save the rest of the day for the children, but then when the children are faced with a real fire, they run to a place of perceived safety and lock the doors.”

It’s a real problem, she said, “but no one really knows about it.”

That’s why Pittman is trying to educate parents, children and the public through Fearless Fire Drills, a company she started to show schools and parents how to teach children with sensory sensitivity to respond in an emergency situation.

It all started in response to a first-grader at Crestline Elementary who wouldn’t come in the building the first week of school because he feared a fire drill.

“We were determined to help him,” Pittman said. “We got a fire alarm and taught him how to cope with the drill and do it with his peers.”

But in the course of teaching him, she learned that children like him were being routinely removed from the classroom before the drills so that it wouldn’t ruin their day.

Then she started doing some broader research, first with the teachers at the conference, then with children.

“It was tragic how often this was happening,” she said.

So the Fearless Fire Drills curriculum software was birthed to address the problem, narrated by Fearless the Fire Dog.

“He explains to the children that they are going to learn some fire safety skills, and they play some games and watch a modeling video showing real children during a drill,” Pittman said. “It shows the children what to do and also what not to do, like running and hiding and getting away from the group.”

The program follows up with reinforcement games and quizzes, she said.

The program has seen a lot of success already, even though it only officially launched in late January.

“The children that had a really difficult time with the drills, after they completed the training, they could do anything,” Pittman said.

Sandy Naramore, director of Mitchell’s Place, a center for children with autism, said she saw exactly that happen. The children at her center were part of Fearless Fire Drills’ pilot program.

She told the story of one child who’d had a particularly challenging time with fire alarms in the past but saw a major turnaround.

“The mother was cooking dinner and she burned something and the smoke detector went off,” Naramore said. “Our child who had previously been very disturbed by the alarm system calmly stood up, pushed his chair in, went to the back door of the house, turned around and told the rest of the family, ‘Line up, it’s a fire drill.’”

Naramore said she highly recommends the program.

It’s not rocket science, Pittman said, but it “helps children feel empowered,” and they retain the skills they learn.

“We’re excited to see this spread and see how other children can learn to do this,” she said.

For more information, visit fearlessfiredrills.com.