The end of the year is a time to reflect back on so many changes. Recently, Brenda Hall and Mary Giles, nurse and principal, respectively, of the Arkansas Enterprises for the Developmentally Disabled preschool, stood outside the building under a balmy winter sun and talked about car seats. What were the seats like when they were tykes?
Huh? No car seats?
“None. And we were in the back of the truck. We had a truck, and six of us kids,” Hall said.
“Even my oldest child came home in my lap,” Giles said. “You know, they just handed you the baby in your lap. You secured him, and you rolled on.”
So, imagine the surprise at AEDD when earlier this year a liability inspector pointed out that two of the preschool’s car seats had expired.
“He said, ‘You know, I noticed a couple of your car seats’ dates are expired,’ and two or three [of us] said, ‘We didn’t even know car seats had expirations.’”
To Giles and her staff’s credit, they immediately inventoried all of the agency’s car seats, and many more were expired or soon-to-be expired. We’re not talking about a few car seats. There are a dozen buses at the old McRae Elementary in North Little Rock, and each one is loaded with car seats. And the school’s budget is shoestring - it had already spent its capital improvement budget resealing the nearly century old elementary school. Giles knew it was going to be big money.
Enter Debbie Grooms, with a modest plan to raise the money above and beyond the fundraising and major gifts campaigning that Grooms does in the course of her 2,000-plus working hours per year as development coordinator. She put the call out to the 42-woman AEDD auxiliary as well as generous corporate sponsors such as Allied Therapy. She also built a link on AEDD’s website to a pledge page and sent the word out to a wider audience. This was early in the fall.
With a goal of $6,000 - the rough estimation is that the school needs 100 car seats at $60 each - the campaign is halfway to its goal. To be clear, the school has since bought and implemented 80 seats so that no child is riding in an expired safety seat.
“It is a challenge,” she said, referring to the act of asking for support at fundraisers and yearly giving campaigns, then going back to the same donors for special campaigns, “but, at the same time, we have a pretty large base of people who know about or are involved in AEDD in some way, who may not have been able to attend a fundraiser or had not given to our Thanksgiving food drive or our toys for the kids at the preschool at Christmas, and they think, ‘Oh, I haven’t given anything to them this year, I’ll help out.’ ... And then, we have some people who we are the main focus in their giving, and so, pretty much, whenever we have something going on, it seems like they freely give to us.” YOU’VE COME A LONG WAY, BABY
A spokesman at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, speaking on background, said car seat expiration is “a voluntary industry practice” based on manufacturers’ own determination of the durability of their products. The administration itself does not require or regulate expiration dates. He then referred questions to the Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association, which represents 17 different car seat manufacturers.
Julie Vallese, the association’s managing director of government and public affairs, said the lifetime of nearly all car seats is six to eight years. That’s not because car technology outpaces car seat technology and accelerates obsolescence, it’s the plastic itself.
“While this is a safety device and provides protection for your child in the event of a crash, it does have its limits. The material, over time, can break down,” she says. “When I say break down, it doesn’t mean the car seat is going to break into pieces or that it’s somehow going to fall apart. Most car seats are made of heavyweight, molded plastic, but through different environmental conditions - hot, cold, humid, dry - there is an expanding and a contraction of that material, and … there can be a softening, or changes in the structure of the car seat.”
Every car seat has an expiration date, and that number isn’t printed on a sticker but molded into the core plastic structure, typically on the back side of it.
Vallese, who is herself a certified car seat technician, also said one of most routine questions she fields has to do with car seats that have been in wrecks. Even very minor accidents should precipitate buying a new car seat.
While the traffic safety administration doesn’t countenance expiration dates, it does put each car seat through a set of crash tests, what in the industry are called “213s”for short. No car seat on the American market today falls short of those test standards. CRASH COURSE ON CAR SEATS
This mini-fundraiser has proved to be a lesson in car safety seat expectations. It’s an education.
“It used to be, if you have a car seat, it was good enough,” Giles says. “Now we have to be particular.”
Children don’t even face forward in a car seat until they’re well into toddlerhood, and, according to national safety standards, no child under 4 feet, 9 inches should be without a booster seat of some kind.
To find out more about car seat safety, go to the NHTSA website, Safercar.gov/parents/ and click on “Car Seats.” To find out more about the Arkansas Enterprises for the Developmentally Disabled preschool, visit AEDDInc.org. There, if you want to make a donation for car seats, you can click the Support Us tab, and under the first drop down menu, select Seats for Safety. Or you can call (501) 666-0246.
High Profile, Pages 33 on 12/29/2013