Seminar teaches children safety around strangers
“Fire! Fire! I don’t know this man; he’s not my daddy!”
If anyone at Sky Centers Martial Arts in downtown Lombard didn’t know a children’s safety seminar was taking place Saturday morning, they might have thought a child actually was being attacked.
But luckily, all the yelling, screaming and running was only role play.
George “Master Sky” Matejovsky, owner of Sky Centers, hosted the first of two free children’s safety seminars Saturday at his gym, 112 W. St. Charles Road, where he taught about 10 children how to get away and get help when threatened by a stranger.
He’ll host a second seminar at 11 a.m. Feb. 25 at Health Track Sports & Wellness, 875 Roosevelt Road, Glen Ellyn with the same goals of teaching children nonaggressive ways to identify potentially dangerous situations and stay safe.
Yelling and running away when a stranger gets too close was one of the main strategies Matejovsky had the children practice Saturday.
“If you’re scared, you want everyone to know so you can get a lot of people helping,” he said.
Matejovsky told kids a stranger is anyone they don’t know or anyone who makes them feel uncomfortable, and he advised parents to make sure their children know who can be trusted. Creating a family password can help children know which other adults their parents trust and which are strangers.
“Tell your children who is a trusted adult in their life because if you don’t, they’re guessing,” Matejovsky said.
The next step he taught children was to tell a trusted adult about the stranger and to describe the stranger’s clothing and appearance as well as possible. Kids practiced on Matejovsky, pointing out the dragon design on his T-shirt, his black belt with yellow letters, and his big nose.
But 5-year-old Collin Angelakos of Lombard didn’t have much to add to the description of Matejovsky, his mother, Julie, noticed.
“I think it really helped me to see what they don’t know, like my son wasn’t good at describing what Master Sky looked like,” Angelakos said.
But now she’ll work with Collin and her 8-year-old daughter Lea on being more descriptive in case they encounter a dangerous stranger.
Parent Jorie Wilson said she brought her 8-year-old son Ryan to the class because a man recently walked in and began talking to children at the park district where Ryan goes for after-school care.
“It was a great way for him to relearn everything ... and put a trigger in his brain to realize there are strangers,” said Wilson, of Westmont.
Using a curriculum developed by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and Honeywell Hometown Solutions called Got2BSafe, Matejovsky summed up the safety strategies he taught children as “No, go, yell, tell.”
“I suggest this only be the start of your child safety plan, not the end.”