All about safety
Safety Town equips youngest learners with lifelong tools
Jessica Markie is passionate about Safety Town. She initially joined the program as an assistant and has served as the program director since 2014.
“I thought it was the coolest thing ever,” Markie said. “I really wanted to take over. I wanted it to be my classroom. When I finally had the opportunity, I was just so thankful.”
She attributes Safety Town’s popularity and success to the enthusiasm of the volunteers who show up for each week-long session to entertain and educate the children.
The program, held at Barnes Early Childhood Center from 9 to 11:30 a.m., is typically for upcoming kindergarten and first grade students, but was offered this summer to second graders who didn’t have the opportunity to attend last summer due to the pandemic. The program’s mission is to equip these young learners with the tools they need to remain calm and safe during emergency situations.
Police officers come from all five Grosse Pointes and Harper Woods public safety departments. The program also welcomes volunteers from the U.S. Coast Guard, Medstar and DTE Energy. Other special guests include a representative from local bike shop Bikes Blades & Boards and WXYZ meteorologist Kevin Jeanes.
Topics covered during the week include traffic safety, positive interactions with police officers, gun safety, car and seatbelt safety, bicycle safety, boating and water safety, electrical safety, stranger-danger awareness and body safety. In addition, students learned about a typical life in the day of a paramedic along with drug safety awareness and poison prevention.
Wednesdays is fire safety instruction. On Thursdays, the students visit the fire safety house for a fun simulation of fire and smoke and to learn safety techniques, like “stop, drop and roll,” identifying a special family meeting place and sleeping with their bedroom doors closed.
Whatever the lesson taught, the volunteers make it fun, creating chants and rhymes that are easy for the children to remember, Markie said. A surefire hit at each session is DTE Energy’s mascot, Louie the Lightning Bug, who demonstrates through hand gestures how water and electricity don’t mix, among other important safety measures.
The week concludes with a graduation ceremony. Families are invited to hear about everything the children learned, and a volunteer speaks about the importance of the program.
Each week flies by, Markie says, but she gets attached to each group of children even in that short amount of time.
“They’re so proud of everything they learned and we’re so proud of them,” she said.
Enrollment for Safety Town begins in early March and sessions fill up quickly. Check the district website for more information.
About the instructors
Jessica Markie began teaching at age 15 as a teacher’s assistant at a local childcare center. She has nearly 20 years of experience working with children, nine with the Grosse Pointe Public School System. She and her husband, Mike, have two children, both of whom attend the GPPSS child development and preschool program. Markie received an Associate of Arts degree in Early Childhood Studies in 2011 and is studying elementary education at Wayne State University. In the fall, she will teach the half-day preschool program at Richard Elementary School.
Safety Town classroom assistant Riley Crook is a recent graduate of Grand Valley State University, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in special education. She began working in a classroom as a senior at Grosse Pointe North High School through its early education program, spending the last few hours of each school day at Barnes Early Childhood Center. Crook has spent the past five summers working at Barnes and in the fall will begin her first year of teaching in her own classroom at Rockwell Middle School, a Macomb Intermediate School.
Graduate spotlight: Christina Thomas
Harvard University was Christina Thomas’s dream school since she was young.
“Back in eighth grade, I said to all of my teachers and my parents, ‘I want to go to Harvard.’ That was a goal I set for myself,” the 2021 Grosse Pointe South graduate said.
Christina also applied — and was accepted — to Princeton, Yale, the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. She stuck with her first choice of Harvard, where she plans to major in English with an eye on law school in the future.
This summer, she is experiencing a taste of that future as an intern at Cahalan & Krall, a law firm in St. Clair Shores. She got to know partner Thomas Krall when he served as coach of Grosse Pointe South’s mock trial team. While he didn’t coach her senior year, he attended several practices and offered her the summer position at his firm.
A lifelong Grosse Pointe Park resident, Christina attended The Grosse Pointe Academy from age 3 through eighth grade. She admits it took a year to acclimate to the larger environment of a public high school.
“First year when I was a freshman I was a little bit shy, a little reclusive,” she said. “I wasn’t sure what I wanted to focus on, especially coming from such a small school like the Academy. I tried a couple things, like mock trial and sailing. I even tried basketball, but that did not stick at all.”
She started to get more involved her sophomore year, joining several clubs while continuing with the sailing and mock trial teams. She also got involved with a social justice club at South called SEEDS, which stands for Student Empowerment: Education for a Diverse Society.
Christina heard about SEEDS from her sophomore year Algebra II teacher, Lisa Kline, who also is the SEEDS faculty adviser. Kline recommended Christina apply for the University of Michigan’s Summer Youth Dialogues on Race and Ethnicity, which serves as a training program for SEEDS. Christina applied and was accepted.
Attending U of M’s Summer Youth Dialogues program and getting involved in SEEDS represented a turning point for Christina. Ironically, it was the teacher of the subject area she found most difficult who had the biggest impact on her, she said, changing the course of her academic career.
“I always struggled with math, but when I got to math class with Mrs. Kline, she made it so much more enjoyable and easier because she interacted with us to make sure we got what we needed and always pushed us to do our best,” Christina said. “She felt like more of a friend than a teacher. Because of the friendship we built, when she approached me about doing Summer Dialogues, it was really moving to me because I felt like she understood what I wanted to do beyond a math class.”
Christina learned a lot from the summer program that helped her become a stronger leader when she returned to South in the fall to help advance the work of SEEDS.
“The biggest thing I learned was how to recognize social issues in your community and how to create a real solid plan to address it,” she said. “The first part of acknowledging an issue is a whole lot easier than the second part of trying to fix it. I saw that in the program as we were working on the plan, we were reenacting the problems we were trying to address. People were talking over each other, not listening.
“It was a real wake-up call to see that even when you’re working on these problems, you can create more problems,” she continued. “When I learned to recognize that, I was able to come back to South and form plans without causing more problems.”
Through SEEDS, Christina had the opportunity to speak in front of her classmates and the school about addressing some of the issues at South, including racial insensitivity. She also spoke with a state representative, the Board of Education, South administrators and various other groups to raise awareness.
Within South, Christina and her co-leaders held weekly meetings and organized large-scale projects like Dialog Day and Culture Week. The club had a two-pronged approach, she said: to provide opportunities for students to talk about issues and to get them involved in activities to help raise awareness.
“Do what you love to do and do it well.”
While COVID created some setbacks last year, Christina said she feels good about the difference SEEDS made at South and is confident friends and upperclassmen will step up as future leaders and continue the work she and others started.
“I think we still have a long way to go,” she said. “The issues haven’t gone away, but I think if we keep moving forward the way that we have so far, they could go away.”
Having enrolled in One GP Virtual last year, Christina is looking forward to returning to an in-person environment at Harvard in the fall. Whether face-to-face or remote, she said she enjoyed an array of classes during her high school career.
“I think it’s enjoyable to learn anything as long as the person teaching is enthusiastic about it,” she said. “Lucky for us, all the teachers at South seem to love what they are doing, so classes were always pretty fun. Even math classes became more enjoyable for me as I opened up more.”
Her advice to younger students is to “do what you love and do it well.”
For example, her favorite classes involved writing.
“I just wrote because I liked to write,” she said. “I think any student who does what they like to do, success will come to them naturally after that.”
That’s Entertainment!
Looking for entertainment for your middle or high schooler this August?
Enrollment is still open for Michigan’s premier show choir and vocal jazz workshop, held at Parcells Middle School. The workshop runs Aug. 21 to 27 and the daily schedule is 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. for middle school students and 12:30 to 5 p.m. for high school students. The workshop fee is $225. Click here for more information and to register.
The final performance, to be held at Parcells at 7 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 27, provides entertainment for community members as well. Tickets are $10 and can be purchased on the Grosse Pointe South Choir website.