Red Cross Pedro teaches Cumberland County children fire safety skills

Pedro the Penguin spent part of a family day at FCI Fairton teaching Cumberland County children how to stay calm and act fast if a home fire or other local hazard strikes. Red Cross New Jersey volunteers brought the mascot to the Federal Correctional Institution at 655 Fairton-Millville Road in Fairfield Township, turning the federal prison complex into a hands-on preparedness lesson for employees’ families.

The American Red Cross’s Prepare with Pedro program is built for grades K-3 and runs about 30 to 45 minutes. It teaches children how to prepare for and respond to home fires or another local hazard, gives them a coping skill to practice, and sends them home with a storybook so the lesson reaches parents as well as students. The Red Cross now offers the program in person or virtually nationwide, a sign that the agency sees early preparedness as a core part of fire prevention, not an add-on after an emergency.

That message carries extra weight in New Jersey, where the Red Cross says hurricanes and home fires are the state’s most common disasters. At FCI Fairton, the lesson landed inside a facility the Bureau of Prisons lists as having 733 total inmates, including 676 at the main federal correctional institution and detention center and 57 at the satellite camp. The setting underscored why outreach is aimed at children: if a family has working smoke alarms, a practiced escape plan and a child who recognizes what to do, the household is in a better position before an alarm ever sounds.

The Pedro visit also fit a larger pattern of Red Cross outreach across the state. In Newark in April 2026, the organization said Pedro educated more than 155 schoolchildren. In Bridgewater that same month, about 60 children took part in Pedro presentations. In Dover, Red Cross volunteers and firefighters taught 1,200 children in 2023 and nearly 600 more in 2024, showing how the program has become a recurring tool for youth fire-safety education in New Jersey.

That broader effort sits inside the Red Cross Home Fire Campaign, launched in 2014. The campaign has installed more than 3,155,000 free smoke alarms nationwide, made more than 1.3 million households safer, and installed more than 60,000 alarms across New Jersey over the last decade while educating about 28,000 households about fire safety. For Cumberland County families, the lesson from Fairton was straightforward: preparedness starts at home, and the smallest children can help drive it.