CLEVELAND, Tenn. — A local nonprofit group wants to begin a program in the public schools that teaches children about avoiding predators.
The program’s core is a computer game called “Sidney Safe Seeker and the Incredible Journey Home.”
“It’s a game kind of like Dora the Explorer,” Dr. Tom Biller of the Behavioral Research Institute told Cleveland City Council members at a recent planning session. “It teaches children very cleverly how to become inoculated, if you will, against child predators.”
The game was developed in 2008 by Canadian child safety expert and video game developer Allan McCullough. Biller said there is a pilot program at the Montessori School in Chattanooga but it is not yet in local public schools.
Butch Varner, a former U.S. Army chaplain involved in helping develop the program, said it is an extension of the old national program called “Stranger Danger.”
“As we know from Penn State and other cases, the children may know the predators,” Varner told council members.
The institute needs $42,000 to get materials into the city school system, and the program’s results would be monitored by the Harvard Medical School, Biller said.
The council suggested he make a presentation to the Cleveland Board of Education.
The institute, which according to its mission statement provides services to families and children to help prevent child abuse and family violence, was founded by Biller in the wake of the fatal Melisha Gibson child abuse case here in the 1970s.