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HARTFORD, CONN. — Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell and Ernie Allen, president and CEO of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, joined EMCOR Group Chairman and CEO Frank T. MacInnis in late September to announce the launch of a threepronged national initiative to help find missing children across the country and promote child safety. More than 2,000 children every day in this country are reported to law enforcement as missing, according to NCMEC.
Under the program, EMCOR Group is "Taking KidSafety to the Street" by displaying NCMEC's posters of missing children on the back of EMCOR's fleet of more than 5,000 trucks and vans across the country, using them as moving billboards to increase public awareness of children reported as missing.
"EMCOR's vehicles that move daily from its 130 offices to 12,600 jobsites throughout the United States will cut a wide swath of increased awareness that we hope will exponentially increase the chances of finding missing children throughout the thousands of communities where we live and work," MacInnis said.
The vehicle posters have been designed by EMCOR so that photos of missing children and NCMEC's 24-hour nationwide hotline, 800/843-5678, are highly visible. Furthermore, the posters are tailored to six different geographic zones that encompass the entire country. New photos will be rotated in on a monthly basis.
The second prong of the program goes inside buildings and involves EMCOR's more than 2,000 facilities services personnel — who maintain hundreds of public and private facilities across the country — being trained to implement Code Adam. This program is activated when a child is first reported as missing within a facility and before the arrival of law enforcement personnel.
"Literally millions of people in urban and rural areas across the country frequent the facilities we maintain and see our trucks on the roads and at locations 24/7/365," MacInnis said. "We're at construction sites, retail outlets, airports and other transportation centers, hospitals, schools, museums and nearly every other conceivable location — places where missing kids and those who have seen them could be. This program is an in-thebuildings and on-the-streets solution that has great potential to make a very important difference."
As a third prong of its program, EMCOR continues its initiative online at www.emcorgroup.com/kidsafety. A special brochure created by EMCOR, "My Safety Tips," provides kids with NCMEC's rules for child safety and Internet safety tips as well as building safety tips. After reading these rules, either online or by printing them out in the form of a brochure or poster for their rooms, children are then invited to take "The KidSafety Challenge." A self-guided quiz, children are then offered the opportunity to conclude by printing out a "KidSafety Certificate" of accomplishment, which shows that they know the important ways to keep themselves safer in various situations.
EMCOR is also making these materials available to businesses across Connecticut and the country in order that organizations are aware of and encouraged to distribute this information to their employees and families.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is a nonprofit organization that works in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Since it was established in 1984, NCMEC has assisted law enforcement with more than 116,000 cases, resulting in the recovery of more than 94,000 children.
For more information about NCMEC, call its toll-free, 24-hour hotline or visit www.missingkids.com