Los Alamos High students build new props for Safety Town

High school shop skills helped reset one of Los Alamos’s most familiar early-childhood safety lessons as students in Los Alamos High School’s Stagecraft and Theatrical Building Trades class built new props for Safety Town. The refreshed miniature police station, fire station and Century Bank building will join stop signs and stoplights when incoming kindergartners ride bicycles through the course at Barranca Mesa Elementary School.

The project gave older students a hands-on construction assignment while reinforcing a countywide effort that has grown into a long-running public safety pipeline for young children. Safety Town began in 2015 under Police Chief Dino Sgambellone and has now served more than 900 children. More than 100 incoming kindergarten students were registered for this year’s session, which ran June 1 through June 5 at Barranca Mesa Elementary and was limited to 100 participants. The daily schedule ran from 8:30 a.m. to noon.

Safety Town is sponsored by Los Alamos Public Schools, Los Alamos County and the Los Alamos Police Department, a partnership that has kept the program rooted in local institutions rather than a single school or agency. In 2025, county officials said more than 800 children had taken part since the program began. In 2024, the program had surpassed 675 total participants and celebrated 85 graduates, and a year later 71 incoming kindergartners completed the course. The steady rise shows how the program has become a recurring part of family life in Los Alamos, not just a one-time event.

The curriculum has covered bicycle and helmet safety, traffic and intersection safety, wild and domestic animal safety, and who to contact in an emergency. In recent years, the program has also included donated bicycle helmets from Century Bank and the Los Alamos Public Schools Foundation, along with help from local professionals and community sponsors. Those layers of support matter in a town where early safety education depends on more than classroom instruction alone.

Jennifer Guy praised the collaboration and said the younger students would be excited to see the refreshed buildings. Sgambellone said the partnership with Los Alamos Public Schools helps keep one of the community’s most beloved programs strong for the future. The new props tie that future to the students who built them, showing how Los Alamos hands down safety education through schools, county government and volunteer community effort.