National nonprofit Kars4Kids today announced the upcoming release of a free app to prevent parents and caregivers from forgetting their young children in the car. With the summer only just begun and news headlines already reporting several heatstroke deaths of children forgotten in cars, the Kids N Kars app gives concerned parents a tangible preventative measure they can take to ensure such a story doesn’t happen to them.
Press release:
National nonprofit Kars4Kids today announced the upcoming release of a free app to prevent parents and caregivers from forgetting their young children in the car. With the summer only just begun and news headlines already reporting several heatstroke deaths of children forgotten in cars, the Kids N Kars app gives concerned parents a tangible preventative measure they can take to ensure such a story doesn’t happen to them.
The Android app connects with a car’s Bluetooth technology to trigger an alert when the driver’s phone disconnects from the car, serving as a reminder to parents to take their children out with them. With summer temperatures often reaching the eighties, a vehicle’s internal temperature can climb to 109°F, the degree which is fatal for children, in well under an hour.
Though few parents imagine that they could ever forget a child of theirs in the car, research has shown that such a memory lapse could happen to even the most conscientious, responsible and loving parent. In many cases, a change in routine or schedule coupled with a fatigued mind is the cause. Add the fact that parents are advised to keep their children out of sight in rear-facing car seats until age two at least, and the possibility of forgetting them there is no longer so remote.
With the launch date being in the next couple of weeks, Kars4Kids is releasing the Kids n Kars app in conjunction with a widespread awareness campaign to educate parents of the dangers involved in forgetting their children for even a short time in a hot vehicle. “The stories you read in the news are truly heart wrenching,” said Kars4Kids spokesperson Wendy Kirwan. “We believe that awareness is key to prevention as so many people still believe that only a bad or irresponsible parent would forget their child in the car. If our app means the difference between life and death for even just one child, all our effort was worthwhile.”
For more information about the app and safety initiative, visit http://www.kars4kids.org/kidsnkars.
Kars4Kids is a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that works to give back to the community through a variety of education, youth development, family outreach and faith-based programs. The charity provides an array of services to children and families including educational programming, school placement, tuition assistance, mentorship programs, cultural activities, religious instruction, recreation and guidance counseling.
Kars4Kids is a haredi kiruv (missionary outreach) organization whose primary aim is to (for want of a better term) convert non-Orthodox Jewish kids to haredi Judaism.
It has repeatedly been in trouble with states' attorneys general for misleading donors about that purpose and about its relationship with the haredi kiruv organization Oorah. Kars4Kids serves as a fundraising organization for Oorah, and the vast majority of the money Kars4Kids raises goes to Oorah for its kiruv activities.
Even though the amount has increased since Kars4Kids settled with the states that challenged it, only a small amount of the money Kars4Kids (and Joy For Our Youth, another nonprofit controlled by Oorah) raises goes to help non-Jewish children.
Kars4Kids' most common ploy is to donate a few thousand dollars worth of winter coats in a very depressed, heavily minority area like inner city Newark, New Jersey, but stage that donation as a public spectacle with hundreds of often desperate poor non-Jews lined up outside in cold weather, vying for the small supply of coats Kars4Kids has to give out. Local politicians – often unaware of Kars4Kids' history – visit the giveaway, which is staged in a very public area. Media covers it, and for literally a tiny amount of money relative to what Kars4Kids takes in every year, Kars4Kids get massive free publicity.
But Kars4Kids also gets something much more important to it – some protection against lawsuits brought by many states' attorneys general.
(A source told me last year that many of the coats Kars4Kids gives away are actually donated to it by a non-Jewish charity. If that is true, the small amount of revenue disbursed to needy non-Jews by Kars4Kids would be even smaller.)
All that being said, the app is a good idea, and Oorah/Kars4Kids should be commended for doing it.