Sitting criss-cross applesauce on the classroom floor, 16 students turned their attention to the front and photos to show off what they’d learned over the last 10 days for their families.

Ryan Beam, aka Capt. Awesome, pointed to a photo and asked what it was.

“Stop light!”

What does red mean?

“Stop!”

What does yellow mean?

“Slow down, look around,” came their resounding reply.

What does a smoke alarm sound like?

Beep! Beep! Beep!

What do you do when you hear that and there’s a fire?

“Get out and stay out!”

Do you go back in a burning building?

“No!”

They learned about outlets and had a homework assignment to ask their parents where the breaker box was located.

The students were completing their final day at Safety Town, a 10-day program for rising kindergarteners through Great Falls Public Schools with a variety of community partners.

Safety Town was created in 1937 by a police officer and a kindergarten teacher after a child was hit by a car and killed while walking to school.

Students learn, have fun at Safety Town

The program started with traffic safety and has since expanded to include other area such as fire, kitchen and bike safety, as well as stranger danger and more. The Great Falls program also includes railroad and farm safety.

The local program is a partnership with Great Falls Public Schools and the National Safety Town Center, and was established in 2022 with a $10,000 innovation grant through the Great Falls Public Schools Foundation.

With the grant funding, organizers built their Safety Town village at Skyline School with a roadway course that incorporates stop signs, yield signs, a roundabout, railroad crossing and a one-way.

Now the program is funded through community sponsors, donors and participation fees.

Griffith said that the 2024 program had a waitlist but this year’s wasn’t full, but they had more volunteers this summer.

She said she’s hoping the program continues to grow and parents told The Electric that they tell all their friends about the program to get their rising kindergarteners enrolled.

Throughout the camp, students get to be motorists on tricycles to learn road safety and pedestrians to learn how to safety cross streets.

Beam told families how they’d been visited by the Great Falls Police Department and were able to see their gear and sit in the patrol car, including the “stuffed and cuffed” seat, which one child said was “very uncomfortable.”

Torgerson’s Equipment visited and students learned about farm life and safety with a visit from Torgy the Tractor.

Beam, the Safety Town instructor, handed out their completion certificates with a key that had their “key lessons” on it.

Handing the key to one child, the response was, “I hope it turns on a tractor!”

Safety swag in hand, the students headed outside to “Safety Town,” complete with replicas of local buildings and a road course of yields, traffic lights, railroad and pedestrian crossings to show families their new safety skills on Strider bikes and as pedestrians.

Asked what she liked about Safety Town, Elle Yoder said dancing helped her learn about safety and one of her favorite things was “slow down, look around.”

Her time in the program that she said she’d been looking forward to for quite some time will help her as she enters kindergarten.

Elle and the other participants made bracelets during the week with numbered beads of a parent’s phone number and by the end of the week, she had just about memorized her.

On June 27, the final day of this year’s program, students were celebrating and enjoying the newest building added to Safety Town, a replica of the main Great Falls College MSU building that Dick Anderson’s construction boot camp built that week at the college.

Veronica Griffith, Safety Town coordinator, said it had just been delivered that morning and some of the students said that was their mom’s school and it was nice to have those community connections.

They’ve also recently added replicas of Scheels and Howard’s Pizza, as well as the Great Falls Public Library and the scout building, after starting with the Milwaukee Depot in the first years.

This year, Jonah Hunt, a local student who had volunteered at Safety Town for a few years, built the library and scout buildings as an Eagle Scout project.

Two more buildings, Benefis and Town Pump are coming soon, since with all those vehicles in the mini town, they needed a gas station, Griffith joked.

The buildings are donated by local businesses and organizations.

This year’s program is being featured in a documentary and Griffith said she’s “delighted they chose our Safety Town.”

“The Safety Town Movie is a feature-length documentary about a nearly century-old child safety program that teaches real-world safety skills to kids in miniature towns. The film follows communities across the U.S. working to keep these programs alive — highlighting the people, places, and children that make Safety Town so special. Told through a child’s-eye view and an immersive verité style, the documentary is a warm, cinematic look at growing up, civic responsibility, and how we care for each other in an uncertain world,” according to the film makers.

H. Spencer Young, the documentary director, said part of the project is to show the vast beauty of the country and area places people might not have experienced.

“You can’t do better than this, Montana is pure magic,” Young said.

His team had fallen in love with Great Falls, he said, and the locals who had been genuine, generous and open.

They’re looking at the world of childhood in the U.S. through the lens of Safety Town and it’s a “beautiful perspective.”

The Great Falls kids, Young said, are “all naturals on camera,” who by the end of the week were ready to be mic’d up, asking what they were shooting that day.

The film crew also spent time with the families to get perspective of their lives outside of Safety Town and “the time we spent with the families was extraordinary.”

The Manhattan based filmmaker said the documentary release date was yet to be determined, but they were keeping in touch with the included programs to let them know.

“There’s something about Great Falls,” Young said. “It’s so grounded, we feel so at ease here.”