AKRON, Ohio - Students at North High School, Akron's international neighborhood, recently launched a project to take the Sound the Alarm, Save a Life initiative a few steps further, while gaining research and presentation skills.

Earlier this week, in a school in which 16 languages are spoken, 10th-grade students in the Akron Children's Hospital Academy of Health and Human Services shared their ideas with area "experts" on how to best get the word out about fire safety in the home.

North High hosts the first two academies in the Akron Public Schools district: the Children's Academy of Health and Human Services and the Academy of Global Technology and Business, which does not yet have a named partner. Akron schools are transitioning to the career-focused academy model, which links academic subjects to career pathways and college majors.

All Akron school district students have been distributing Sound the Alarm, Save a Life materials to parents, caregivers and neighbors since late fall in response to three fires over the past year that killed nine Akron children in houses with no fire alarms.

The Akron Fire Department and the American Red Cross partner locally on Sound the Alarm, which distributes and installs free smoke alarms and offers educational material in an attempt to end fire-related deaths in Akron over the next three years.

English teacher Julie Pinney came up with the idea for the student-led presentations, dubbed the "North Hill Smoke Out," after the third fire in October. An earlier fire had taken the lives of two students who lived near the high school.

"Having to drive by that location every day, I realized that even if we could get the word out about the free smoke detectors to our culturally diverse North Hill population, a vast majority of them would not take advantage of the offer because they can't speak or understand English fluently," Pinney wrote in an email. "Therefore, the need arose to find a way to get this information into the hands of the entire community."

The project started with a survey of the North High School population to understand what languages were spoken at home and whether smoke detectors and a fire-safety escape plan were in place.

Of 900 students, 479 families responded. The surveys revealed half the school's population are English-language learners from 20 countries, with about 15 percent of them having moved to Akron in the past two years.

Pinney also introduced students to QR codes, as the Sound the Alarm brochures was translated into eight languages.

The students worked in 23 teams of three to five kids, each drawing up a plan along with its implementation. The goal was to ensure everyone in the community has access to, and can understand, information on the importance of having a family plan in place to survive a fire, said North High Academy Coach Janice Weaver.

On Monday and Tuesday, representatives from the Red Cross and the Akron Fire Department evaluated 23 student presentations, in a science fair-style format, that included a short presentation by the students and visual aids.

Several teams focused on hosting large events to draw community members together to disseminate the information. Some used QR codes to reference translated versions of the brochure, while others used the codes to retrieve informational videos the students would produce to explain fire safety in different languages.

Rather than choose one individual idea, the student teams will work together to consolidate the best ideas into one workable approach, Weaver said.

The project not only offered the students valuable research and presentation experience, it also opened their eyes to the diversity in their own neighborhood, Pinney said.

"It made them realize that other people's lives matter as much as their own," she said. "They were willing to use the translating abilities and talents of our many bilingual students to reach out to many different populations. It created a unique appreciation for the cultures of others."

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