Emerson Wright and Roberts

“We want everyone to have an emergency preparedness plan,” said Carol Emerson to the Cambridge Lions Club. Emerson is the coordinator of the Guernsey County Citizens Corps. She presented Meadowbrook Middle School student Lori Wright with an emergency preparedness kit for her school’s winning preparedness poster. Wright was accompanied by Meadowbrook health educator Rusty Roberts.

“We want to disseminate as much information as we can,” Emerson said. “We want businesses to have a plan for the continuity of their operations. We want families to have a plan to know how to respond to any disaster.”

“We also have been working on how we care for our senior citizens and those with special needs,” Emerson said. “We have visited assisted living facilities and formed a focus group for special needs. We have tried to identify where these people live and how we would respond to care for them.”

The citizens corps has sent letters to county businesses, spoken to community groups and conducted educational efforts through area schools. “We decided to have a competition between schools to research and make posters about preparedness,” Emerson said.

“We split up into groups of three or four and selected and researched our topic,” said Wright. “We made a rough draft of our proposal and then revised our posters. We also did a presentation in our classrooms.”

“We like to have these kinds of events in our schools,” Roberts said. “We like to have guest speakers. Our kids are great, They don’t always remember everything presented to them, but they are going to remember where to go to get information.”

Buckeye Trail students produced the winning poster at the high school level. Meadowbrook Middle School had the winning poster for that age group. Elementary schools participated in similar age appropriate activities. “We hope that all of our elementary students went home and discussed preparedness with their families,” Emerson said.

In other club business Ron Guthrie reported that the club had approved sixty eight applications for assistance so far this year. Dan Luskovich reported that in the last month we assisted with the purchase of six pairs of eyeglasses for those in need, provided funds to the fire department for smoke detectors and batteries for the alert and alive program, and had donated to the upcoming community Thanksgiving dinner at the First Christian Church.