Trainers are motivated to teach others about car-seat safety

TUCSON – The toddlers were playing naked and unattended in a park when police officers found them.

The temperature was already 85 degrees on an unseasonably warm day in April. Tucson police needed to quickly transport the 2- and 3-year-old siblings to the police station.

Officer Monica VanNorman, who works at the operations division in downtown Tucson, found two car seats in storage back at the station.

“I remember thinking, ‘How do we tie these down?’ ” VanNorman said. “We did the best we could.”

The seats were still loose. And VanNorman didn’t know at the time both were out of date. Another officer sat between them and held on for the 1-mile ride from the park to the station. They drove slowly.

The story ended without injury and the children were returned to their mother. But VanNorman was agitated at how clueless she was when it came to the car seats.

“I felt naive,” VanNorman said. “It was a car seat. How complicated could this be?”

In June, she turned her frustration into motivation and applied to become a certified Child Passenger Safety or CPS technician.

The national certification comes from Safe Kids Worldwide, which has a team of 38,000 technicians who teach about child-passenger safety across the nation. The classes are open to anyone for an $85 fee, though many technicians are firefighters, police and nurses.

Once VanNorman and others are trained, they will be able to teach parents and grandparents how to properly install car seats.

Despite the best intentions, roughly four out of five parents don’t install car seats correctly, a consistent rate for decades, according to repeated surveys and medical studies.

Hispanic and Native American parents are even less likely to buy and use car seats correctly, for a variety of cultural and economic reasons. An analysis of studies by The Arizona Republic found that, depending on the child’s age, the type of seat and other factors, Hispanic and Native American children were from two times to as much as 10 times more likely not to be properly restrained.

As a result, Hispanic and Native American children are killed or injured in car accidents at significantly higher rates than other children, the studies indicate.

That reporting prompted The Republic to bring together a coalition of community groups that is working to promote car-seat safety through the campaign Seat Them Safely.

VanNorman recognizes the challenge and significance.

“I’m going to learn how to do this,” she said. “I am going to perfect it. So next time a situation like that happens, then at least I can step up and I know what I am doing.”

Officers in class

At a recent CPS class in Tucson, VanNorman joined 15 other students, all but one from the Tucson Police Department.

Many of them were motivated by stories like VanNorman’s.

Each was prepared for four full days of learning about car seats, belts and buckles in order to prevent another child fatality.

Teddy bears in shirts reading “Buckle Up Arizona” sat on the table in front of each student in the department’s forensic laboratory.

On the first day of training, instructor Danny Peralta, a Tucson police officer, shared a list of statistics about child safety seats:

Once trained, the job of a CPS technician is simple: educate caregivers on car-seat and seat-belt safety. The challenge is taking the information learned during the 32 hours of training and condensing it into a 20-minute conversation with a parent.

In addition to their initial training, technicians must help at enough car-seat safety events to recertify every two years. As of mid-June, 907 car-seat technicians were certified in Arizona, according the Governor’s Office of Highway Safety.

The message they share affects lives.

Car-seat use reduces the risk for infant deaths by 71 percent and toddlers (aged 1–4 years) by 54 percent in passenger vehicles, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Booster seat use reduces the risk for serious injury by 45 percent for children aged 4–8 years when compared with seat belt use alone.

Using these lifesaving devices properly is easier said than done, however. As many as four out of five car seats aren’t installed correctly.

“Correction, selection, installation and use of a car seat can be challenging,” Peralta said. “We are going to try to ease that challenge to parents.”

Spanish-speakers needed

Arizona is particularly in need of technicians who can teach in Spanish.

Hispanics are one of the demographics least likely to use car seats, research has found.

Nationally, almost half of the Hispanic children who died in crashes in 2009 and 2010 were not in car seats or wearing seat belts, compared to a quarter of Anglo deaths, according to the CDC.

But in Arizona, less than 15 percent of all techs can instruct in Spanish, the Governor’s Office of Highway Safety said. Certification classes are not currently offered in Spanish.

Miguel Figueroa, another student in VanNorman’s class, is a school resource officer at Cholla High Magnet School in Tucson. He understands the problem.

His parents are immigrants from small towns in Mexico. Growing up, his family didn’t use safety seats and belts, he explained.

“It wasn’t something in that culture,” Figueroa said. “And that culture is difficult to change.”

Figueroa said when he finishes the class he will comfortable talking about car seats to the Spanish-speaking community.

“Hopefully they use me a little more,” Figueroa said.

Final exam

On the final day of classes, one last test awaited the future technicians.

They had spent more than 24 hours learning about different types of seat belts, where to find information in a car manual and height and weight limits for car seats.

Now, it was time to see if they knew their stuff.

The 16 trainees were tasked with holding a community car-seat check, a smaller version of the type of event technicians do on a regular basis. In two tents behind a SuperTarget, the students waited to help.

“Always put responsibility back on the caregiver,” Peralta told his class.

The technician’s goal isn’t to give a free installation, but to teach the caregivers to install the seat themselves. In fact, the technician cannot be the last one to touch the seat, for liability reasons.

“Look at the whole scenario,” Peralta continued. “The car, the car seat, the caregiver and the child.”

One of the first parents was Heidi Kim, who came with her 21/2-year-old, Rosalind. She was shopping when she saw the signs for a free car-seat check.

Once, when she was pulled over for a traffic violation, an officer failed to tell her that her daughter’s car seat was installed incorrectly, Kim said.

“I wish the officer would have told me when my car seat was in wrong,” she said. “I had the handle up and a toy dangling that would be considered a projectile.”

But the reality is, unless they attend a CPS technician course, many officers don’t have the knowledge to correct specifics, said Tucson Detective Mark Muñoz with the traffic investigations unit.

He has seen too many crashes with children involved, he said, which is why he attended the class.

One crash he responded to involved a mother and baby ejected from the vehicle. The mom had taken the baby out of her seat to burp her, when the car was T-boned. The baby landed on the asphalt.

“The baby did live, but who knows what kind of quality of life she is going to have,” Muñoz said.

As police officers, he said, it can be difficult to convince civilians that they want to help when they are pulling over their car or even holding a public event.

“We are here as the good guys, to show them how to be safer,” he said.

Knowing the nuances

The graduates of the CPS technician class fanned themselves with their new certificates after completing the community event under a blazing summer sun.

Before the class, Tucson Police Department Communications Supervisor Nikki Hoskinson was one of the estimated four out of five parents who incorrectly strapped in their kids. “I’m not now, but I was,” she said, explaining that she now uses the seat belt to fasten the seat correctly.

Incorrect use of a car seat is a citable offense under Arizona law, with fines more than $100 in some jurisdictions.

“Those nuanced things like a seat belt not being tight enough, a harness not being tight enough, are hard to see,” said Tucson officer Mary Pekas. “But if you see a kid jumping in a car in the back seat, it’s obviously a problem.”

But with the knowledge from the class, officers can correct those nuances.

“Instead of writing a ticket, they can just work with them a lit bit and show them how to properly do it,” Pekas said.

VanNorman, the officer who brought the unattended children from the park to the station, no longer feels clueless about car seats.

“At the time, I didn’t know about retractable or emergency locking belts,” she said. “I didn’t know what a modified booster is.”

She wants to get rid of the two expired seats at the station she was forced to use that day.

“Now, I’m going to go back and look at those car seats and get some new ones, better ones,” VanNorman said. “We have to. We are not putting another kid in those car seats.”

In fact, in July the Tucson Police Department purchased two new car seats for children.

“Now I would know how to install both of them,” VanNorman said. “Now there is no question of their security.”