We held our first child ID program on Thursday at the Mackinaw Schools. The turn out average for the state is reported at 10% of the school system. The Mackinaw school system has 100 students grades k - 12 of which we put 44 kids through the program.
We are going to be running the program throughout all the school districts in the county, during our county fair and during the annual Mackinaw Bridge walk. Hopefully we will have completed all the school districts by the end of the year as became my goal when I was Master of my Lodge. This was the primary program I chose to pursue throughout my year in the East. I am a 911 dispatcher and have found that alot of parents do not have this type of information available.
I hope that you are having this success in your Lodges also. I see nothing but good things coming from this program even if its just the public knowledge that this program exists in our neighborhood and it allows parents and law officials to respond quicker.
As an additional note: We had both Lodges in our county there to man the stations as well as our newly formed Rainbows Chapter. During the course of the afternoon we handed out information to more than a dozen interested persons that came to us to ask about our groups. Another great side effect of bringing our groups out of our buildings and showing our communities what we do.
Thank you to all the brothers and their families that take time out of their lives to help with programs like these.
2 comments:
We've had great success with CHIPS in Kansas - in fact we're almost victims of that success as we had to sadly turn away nearly 50 people at our last event because we didn't have enough computers to handle the overflow. we're hoping to buy another computer and associated paraphernalia to enable us to ID more kids next time around. It's a great program!!
Wayfaring Man
http://audevidetace.blogspot.com/
That's a blessing in disguise. Too bad children had to be turned away. Part of our Grand Lodge business this month is an amendment for an additional $1 onto our yearly dues/per capita just for the Child ID program. So for we have been lucky in the north and had enough equipment to handle all the events so far.
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