A group of young children sleep peacefully until the blare of a smoke alarm wakes them up. They quickly crawl over to the bedroom door, which is hot to the touch, so they crawl across the room and out the window. Once out of the house, they gather at the prearranged meeting place, a tree in their front yard, where they receive a high five from a clown and applause from an audience of their peers.

Since the mid-1990s the Haralson County Fire Department has been giving presentations on fire safety to young children in the county school system. This year, the presentations involved 15 firefighters from Haralson, Heard and Carroll Counties, puppets, fire clowns and robots performing a 30-minute skit that teaches children how to react in the event of a fire.

“It’s a really good program on their level,” said Haralson County Fire Chief Brian Walker. “We go to pre-kindergarten classes up through fifth grade.”

Through the skit, the students are taught how to wake up and safely exit a home, how to check a door for heat, how to crawl under smoke, check the bedroom window, how to always have two ways out of a house, and how to call 911. Students also learn how to stop, drop and roll and the importance of not playing with matches.

“We’re seeing results,” Walker said. “We’ve actually been to house fires in Haralson County where kids and the parents say, ‘they knew what to do because what you’ve done it in the schools.’”

On Tuesday morning the fire fighters were at the Buchanan Elementary School gymnasium performing their skits before students. Throughout the presentation, students laughed, raised their hands to answer questions, jumped at the opportunity to participate in the skits and listened to the fire clowns’ message.

“The kids really learn from it,” Walker said. “They interact with us and will remember the [presentation].”

Though fire clowns wear wigs, face paint and humorous clothes like regular clowns, there are some important differences. All fire clowns go through a week-long training program at the fire academy and take a course on alternative teaching methods to earn their fire clown certification.

Though they have smiles painted on their faces, teaching children about fire safety is serious businesses, and the certification ensures that the clowns have the knowledge and skills to effectively teach the young students how to survive a life-threatening fire.

This year the Haralson, Heard and Carroll fire departments have formed the West Georgia Regional Fire Safety Coalition to combine their resources to help educate students. The fire fighters met in January to begin work on their presentations, perfecting them through the summer months to have them ready for autumn and the new school year.

One aspect of fire safety that the clowns strongly emphasize in their presentation is having smoke detectors and changing smoke detector batteries every six months.

“We teach them how to change their smoke alarm batteries every six months when the time changes,” Walker said. “That’s something we want to encourage all our citizens to really adhere to.”

Walker strongly encourages all county residents to have at least one smoke detector for every floor in a home and to change the detector’s batteries at the beginning and ending of daylight savings time.

The fire department has implemented a program to help provide detectors to county residents.

“We want to let everybody know that we have a program set up at Haralson County Fire,” Walker said. “The elderly or indigent care patients that need a smoke alarm, they can contact the fire department, or they can purchase one, and we’ll be happy to come out and install it for them.”