Chief Mack Borchardt has been fire chief in Frisco, Texas, since 1979 and started as a volunteer in 1973. In 1981, Borchardt was in the national spotlight when the mansion that served as the original set for the television show Dallas burned down; it was the biggest house in Frisco. Now, Borchardt is looking to make news with his safety village; its a miniature version of Frisco.

In the scheme of things, building a safety village isn't a real tall order. Find the money, find the land, visit other safety villages, build it and let the schools know you are open for business. But what happens when ideas go beyond what has been built already? That's what Borchardt faced when he set out to build Safety Town.

Borchardt is a lifelong Frisco resident and remembers when the city had a population of less than 2,000. Since that time the Dallas metroplex area has grown by leaps and bounds. And Frisco, on the north end of the metroplex, was not left behind. In fact, Frisco Fire Department's Safety Town has had 20,000 children and adults go through its classes in its first nine months of operations; another 8,000 attend last month's Halloween party. Frisco, which added only 700 people between 1960 and 1970, jumped from 6,000 residents in 1990 to 34,000 in 2000. Mayor Mike Simpson says the population has grown 182% since 2000, with the city adding as many as 800 new residents per month. It is one of the fastest-growing U.S. cities, and Simpson says its population is projected to hit 100,000 by 2008 and 250,000 by 2025.

As the city has grown, so has the fire department. The department has 135 personnel with another 20 to 40 volunteers. It covers 69 square miles and responded to 6,342 calls in 2006; calls increase about 15% per year.

In 2001, FFD earned an ISO 1 rating. The department operates out of five stations, including its newly opened central station. It has one under construction and is averaging a new station every 18 months. When the town is fully built out, FFD will have 14 stations. Not lost in that growth has been expanding the department's community education program. FFD hosts children's birthday parties at the firehouses, they hold a citizens' fire academy twice each year, they work with local schools during October for Fire Safety Month and they've created a clown company to deliver the safety message to students. They also have a citizens' fire academy geared toward seniors. But, for the past 20 years Borchardt has held the notion of building a safety village.

“In the late '80s we saw a safety village in a little east Texas town that was doing bicycle and pedestrian safety in a summer program,” Borchardt says. He thought that the concept would be more successful if it were converted for full-time use.

That notion gained real momentum in 2002 when Frisco voters approved (by 92%) a $19 million bond for the fire department, part of which would be used to replace its central fire station. There was enough room on the five-acre plot to build a safety village next to the central station and $2 million in bond money dedicated to its creation.

Borchardt and the department's lead educator Pam Grimes visited several existing safety villages to get ideas on what one should include. One that they visited in Canada offered many good ideas.

“When I walked into the safety village in Canada, for the first time I saw something close to what we had in mind,” Borchardt says. “We have taken all of those ideas, along with some others, and combined them.”

In Frisco, they still wanted more. But getting more presented two problems: coming up with a big plan and coming up with big money to fund that plan.

“We had to create everything. There was no model for the program we were producing in the manner that we were doing it,” Borchardt says. “We couldn't go anywhere to see how to do this program.”

The plan they came up with called for a L-scale streetscape that replicated Frisco's architecture with real buildings the children could actually enter. It was to have sidewalks, alleys, and two-lane streets with stop signs and working traffic lights. It was to have a working railroad crossing and a tollbooth as well. Depending on the age of the children, they would either be allowed to drive electric-powered vehicles or bicycles through the streetscape to practice pedestrian safety. That would be the fun part of the students' visit that followed the classroom experience.

Frisco set out to create two classrooms, and place a full-scale home inside Safety Town's 8,500-square-foot building. The home's kitchen would serve as one of the classrooms. As visitors learned about safety, the weather, shown on the flat-panel television screens that serve as windows, would grow increasingly ominous. The pre-recorded program on a real television would be interrupted by a tornado warning. The children would be taken to a bathroom and shown how to take cover. Once the danger had passed, the children would return to the mock kitchen for a follow-up recorded message from a Dallas television station meteorologist. From there they would go to an upstairs bedroom. They would be taught how to escape a fire and to check the (heated) door before theater smoke is piped into the room. They would practice what they were taught, which would be capped by an escape out the window and onto a mock roof.

The other classroom was to be used for lessons, and the lobby was to have a real fire truck cut at the wheels to allow children easy access to climb inside. Older children also would be taught things like Internet safety.

But Borchardt and his team did not want the program to be one size fits all. They wanted individual curriculums for each elementary school grade level. They also wanted parents to attend with their children.

Meri-K Appy is president of the Home Safety Council and has spent 25 years teaching children safety. She says this is the right approach.

“The best programs are not one-shot deals, she says. “Research is pretty clear on this. To teach somebody safety so that they understand it well enough to act upon it, and they are motivated to do it, that's a tall order.” Appy says it is critical to have a program that begins in the schools, has a hands-on component, and then has follow up back at school. She also stresses the importance of repetition and age-appropriate messages.

But Appy says the most important audience is the adult population, because they have the power to make changes, such as testing smoke alarms, mapping escape routes or driving to the store to buy a fire extinguisher — all things only an adult can do.

“The babies and the old are the ones most likely to die in a fire,” Appy says. “But it is the (adults) who are in the best position to change that picture. There's hardly any [safety] activity that is systematically targeting the consumer, and that worries me very much.”

Borchardt, too, realizes the importance of reaching adults. His message to teachers is clear: bring the parents. During my visit, I asked parent if she had learned anything. Yes, she says, she'd never thought to cover her head with a towel as protection from broken glass while taking cover from a tornado.

“It was pretty amazing the thought that went into it,” Simpson says of the planning. Part of what impressed the mayor was large items like the technology to the small things like making sure all the doors are secured when the children are there and a canopy over the school bus drop-off area.

In the end, Borchardt got the program he envisioned. The new central fire station opened in November 2006 and Safety Town held its first class the following January.

But for all the creativity that went into the curriculum and design, even more had to go into funding it. Frisco is an affluent community whose residents support the fire department. Yet, Borchardt needed to find more money to build and maintain Safety Town than was allotted in the bond. He turned to public and private partnerships. He approached local and some national businesses with a sponsorship plan.

Here's what they came up with. For $10,000 a sponsor has three years in Safety Town. The sponsor builds a 12-foot by 18-foot building and hangs its sign on it. The city owns the structures and the land — essentially leasing them back to the sponsor. Buying into Safety Town is a tax-free contribution because it is a 501C3 charitable foundation.

There are a lot of officials from other communities coming here to look at how Safety Town's private and public partnership works, Simpson says.

With not yet a year of operation under its belt, nearly all of Safety Town's available real estate is taken. During my visit, two representatives from a local restaurant, Rudy's Bar-B-Q, toured the town; they were considering sponsoring one of the few remaining pieces of real estate. Borchardt gave them the rundown and left them with a packet detailing the folders and a handshake. They will most likely buy in, Borchardt says. And he should know, he's been able to sell sponsorships to 52 different entities including the Texas toll-road authority, local banks, the school district, building developers, one restaurateur, Wal-Mart, FedEx, and the local utility company. He's still not been able to convince any of the railroad companies to sponsor the village's crossing. Some sponsors, such as Holmatro and E-One, didn't erect a building, but still contributed money or equipment.

While Borchardt understands the community and can communicate his vision, prying money from local and national businesses was no slam dunk. “We couldn't go anywhere to show anyone this,” he says of the lack of examples for potential sponsors. So for the first one or two companies he approached, sponsorship was a leap of faith.

The first sponsor Borchardt locked up was the local ABC television affiliate. That gave Safety Town a media contact. Next, they convinced the owner of Richardson Bike Mart to join the ranks. Bike Mart's owner had given Lance Armstrong his first bicycle and is well know for that act. These sponsors were just the legitimation Borchardt needed.

“That allowed us to give (potential) sponsors some measure of security that we could do the project,” he says.

Some contributors did more than write checks to build Safety Town. Two competing contractors worked side by side to do free site work for both Safety Town and the central station. “They told us to take the money we saved and put it back in the program,” Borchardt says. And when Frisco's traffic engineers were asked to get involved, they not only set up the streets, but convinced their vendors to donate L-scale ornamental street lamps and traffic signals — exact replicas of those in Frisco. When all the sponsorship money and in-kind donations are tallied, Borchardt estimates that about $2.5 million was donated, more than doubling the $2 million Safety Town already had in bond money.

With the buildings and program in place, Frisco hired two full-time educators to run the classes at Safety Town. There are about 25 trained volunteers, one to three of whom will show up each day to support the paid staff. Borchardt says the fire department also kicks in time to support Safety Town's operations; that probably equates to one full-time firefighter.

The idea that “if you build it, they will come” can work perfectly in a fictional cornfield in Iowa, but there were no such assurances that it would work in Frisco's very real $4.5 million Safety Town.

Initial estimates were that Safety Town would have 10,000 parents and children come through its doors this year. However, between January and September there have been more than 20,000. Borchardt says he now expects to exceed 30,000 visitors this year; and that's not counting the nearly 8,000 who came for the Halloween party.

Because of the demand, Borchardt has had to give scheduling preference to the school districts in Frisco. He's had requests from schools as far as an hour away. Those requests won't be turned away, but they may have to visit during the fall months, which are less desirable than spring. Safety Town, using its current scheduling model that includes 249 operating days, can accommodate more than 45,000 visitors each year.

“We had the ball rolling with the birthday parties at the firehouse and things like that,” Borchardt says. “What we've gained with this program, as a fire department, is a much higher degree of credibility within our community. It is the customer-service aspect that has paid huge dividends for us.”

Apply the Yardstick

It is one thing to have a community safety program and a completely different matter to measure its success. Whether it is a simple program of handing out smoke alarms or something as complex as Frisco's Safety Town, making quantitative assessments is a difficult proposition. Frisco's Fire Chief Mack Borchardt says measurement is difficult because if prevention works the event doesn't happen.

“If someone has a heart attack and we resuscitate them, we can see that,” he says. But, the department won't see the child who doesn't start a fire or doesn't step in front of a car because of what he or she learned from safety education. “We're hoping we can prevent the fire rather than teach them how to get out when there's smoke.”

Yet Meri-K Appy, president of the Home Safety Council, says there are ways to establish quantitative measurements for safety education programs. And, she says, most departments are not doing much to evaluate those programs.

“We commissioned Johns Hopkins [University] to do a study on the fire safety,” she says. “One of the big takeaways from the national study was recognizing that fire departments haven't embraced evaluations as an integral part of what they do. This undermines our ability to convince people to give us money to do more of what we want to do because we can't prove very well that what we've been doing has been successful.”

Part of the reason for this, she says, is that fire departments often don't understand what goes into an effective evaluation. At HSC, money is budgeted for evaluations, which can be hard because it means less money is going to the program. The council also hires outside firms to conduct the evaluations.

“If we ask ourselves if it worked, we would get a different answer than would somebody who wasn't in love with the program,” she says.

When evaluating a safety village or a safety program, Appy says there are several options to consider. The gold standard is an outcome evaluation. Here, the evaluation is conducted over a long period and measures whether there has been a reduction in what the program is trying to achieve, such as less fires. Because fires are infrequent, this form of evaluation can take a long time.

Frisco Mayor Mike Simpson says looking at the number of fire calls and structure fires will be the best measure of Safety Town's effectiveness.

Borchardt says he expects to conduct an evaluation survey. However, he says Frisco presents some challenges to assessing an evaluation. One is that the community does not have a large fire problem, making it tougher to establish a benchmark.

“We're a rapidly growing community,” he says, “so any number has to be skewed with changing population. It can be done, but it is going to be difficult.” For now, Frisco is relying on feedback from those in the school system and those who go through the Safety Town program.

In the absence of or in addition to a long-term study, a shorter version can be conducted. In the early 1990s, researchers at Johns Hopkins evaluated the effectiveness of a Maryland safety village. The researchers surveyed children, parents and teachers before the safety village visit, just after the visit and four months after the visit.

“I encourage fire departments to call their local health department, which is skilled in program evaluation, or Johns Hopkins or some other injury center,” Appy says. “Often, people trying for an advanced degree are looking for a project.”