Safety Town

The City of Margate opened Safety Town to its residents in November 1999. Safety Town cost approximately eighty-five thousand dollars to build and teaches kindergarten students safety procedures. Safety Town is a cooperative project between the Police Department, Fire Department, the Hospital, Local Schools, and the Margate Parks and Recreation Department.

In 1992, 16 million American children were treated in hospital emergency rooms. Of that number 20,000 to 25,000 died from accident related injuries. To date, that number has been rising. In fact, more children (14 and under) die from preventable accidents than the next two leading causes combined. Recognizing that preventable accidents are the # 1 killer of our children, the Margate Police Department has taken the position of coordinating and implementing the Safety Town program within our community.

Safety Town is a child-sized village designed to teach children the basic safety concepts. The program is directed towards children at the kindergarten, pre-first and first grade level. Children from local and private schools have attended Safety Town, free of charge. Safety Town is a four-hour field trip for the local schools.

Child sized playhouses, or safety stations, make up Safety Town. Each station has an instructor, which will teach the children a specific safety topic. The safety topics are:

Children are familiarized with Safety Town and provided basic instructions. The children are then divided into groups to visit each Safety Town Station. During their visit to Safety Town they will have an opportunity to put on a bicycle helmet and ride specially prepared tricycle through the town, wearing seatbelts and obeying traffic/pedestrian signs and learning basic safety procedures through hands on involvement.