MOOSEHEART, IL - If you made only a brief visit to the Fieldhouse on Wednesday afternoon, April 22, and all you saw at Mooseheart’s Health and Safety Fair was the campus Bounce House, you’d have thought everyone was there to have a very good time.

But moving away for the Bounce House - where students were definitely having fun, to the area surrounding the basketball court, and there were numerous vendors - all there to discuss various aspects of health and safety with the student body.

“It’s a fun day but a lot of planning goes into it,” Mooseheart Superintendent of Education Gary Urwiler said. “The Safety Committee has done a nice job. We do this every other year, and it’s nice to have this educational opportunity for our kids.”

Urwiler said it was important to have many different kinds vendors present at the event which took place Wednesday, April 22. There are many ways to promote greater personal health and to provide greater safety at home, at school or at work. Even the Bounce House - an inflatable room where Mooseheart’s younger students could bounce around and have fun, was still promoting a form of exercise and balance.

In addition to the entire Mooseheart student body, Mooseheart staffers attended the fair, as did staff members from the Moose International headquarters building, which sits on the Mooseheart campus.

“We’ve tried to have a nice variety here today,” Urwiler said. “With the wellness and proper diet and nutrition and exercise, it all helps in spreading a message. Hopefully the kids will put it to use.”

At a number of booths, students could learn the value of nutrition. Aurora University’s athletic training staff had a variety of healthy snack foods that students could put together and take with them. Bananas were available at another table.

Still other booths stressed hygiene. Elgin-based Celebrating Smiles discussed the need to keep one’s teeth properly brushed. And proper hand-washing was also demonstrated at another table. Urwiler noted that of course these are skills taught at Mooseheart, but the reinforcement was positive.

“You look at something like washing hands -- and that’s especially important here,” Urwiler said. “We live in such a confined community that we’re so susceptible to getting anything. We’re always promoting ‘wash your hands, wash your hands’ and it’s good that they hear it here.”

Electrical safety was featured at another booth while various booths stressed forms of physical health. In the parking lot outside the Fieldhouse, the Batavia Fire Department set up its “smoke house,” a trailer into which smoke could be pumped, to give students a feel for how the smoke from a fire spreads into a home.  Nearby, the Illinois State Police set up a “Rollover Simulator” which represented the effects of a car rolling over at 30 mph. The mannequins inside the car could have their seatbelts fastened or taken off - and the results were quite different to those who watched the car flip over and over.

“If you’re wearing your seatbelt, you would stay in the vehicle,” Illinois State Trooper Maria Navarro said. “You might get some bruises or maybe even a broken bone. But you would stay in the vehicle. But when the seatbelt and the shoulder harness is taken off, you see people ejected from the vehicle.”

Navarro said being ejected from the vehicle is rarely a good thing.

“What’s coming next is that the vehicle is going to roll over you,” Navarro said. “You might survive the ejection, but the vehicle is going to roll on top of your body.”

Many of the booths were interactive. At the booth where tooth brushing was featured, there was a large-sized mouth on which to practice. Batavia-based Sharatt Chiropractic had a life-size spinal cord on display.

The Vaughn Center in Aurora set up a Bosu trainer, which looks like a circle cut in half. Standing with the flat portion “down” and a person gains some balance. But standing with the curved side down forces a strong level of balance and students were instructed to use various muscles to stay on the training device.

But the message given by the Vaughn Center’s Heather Uchida is that nutrition and health are linked.

“They’re both pertinent to living a healthy life,” Uchida said. “The Bosu is designed to strengthen the abdominals, the obliques and the lower back. We’re showing how engaging these core muscles will help you to keep those muscles stronger, to have better body alignment and to have better posture.”

One of the other messages Uchida was trying to get across was that a weight-lifting regimen isn’t necessary to achieve a level of fitness.

“We have resistance bands here as well that are like a big rubber band,” Uchida said. “You can use these. You can do easy (stomach) crunches. They can do pushups or pushups with one leg which would also help with balance as well.”

And many of the students not only went to the booths picked up literature but they also asked questions of those vendors in attendance. Urwiler said that while the Health and Safety Fair wasn’t necessarily a job fair, the Mooseheart students were shown any variety of possible careers in a small space.

“We have two stations of the Aurora University kids,” Urwiler said. “It gives some of the kids that chance to say ‘when I go to college, maybe I want to be an athletic trainer.’ These are people in professional careers, and for them to be able to talk about what a state trooper does or what a dentist does is good for them.””

Mooseheart Child City & School is a 1,000-acre community and school for children and teens in need of a secure home, located just south of Batavia, IL, between Illinois Route 31 and Randall Road.

Founded in 1913, Mooseheart is supported completely through private donations - the great majority of which come from the 1.1 million men and women of the Moose fraternal organization, in roughly 1,800 Lodges and 1,600 Chapters located throughout the U.S., Canada, Great Britain and Bermuda. Moose International headquarters is located on the Mooseheart campus.

Since its founding, Mooseheart has operated a complete, accredited kindergarten-through-high-school academic program, plus art, music, vocational training and interscholastic sports. It is an extremely nurturing and student-tailored program, with an average student-teacher ratio of 12-1.

Mooseheart students who complete their studies with a 3.0 GPA or better (4.0=A) are eligible for up to five years of annually renewable scholarship funding, covering tuition, room and board in an amount comparable to that required for an in-state student at an Illinois public university.

Mooseheart is currently home to nearly 250 students, ranging in age from preschoolers to high school seniors. Applications for admission to Mooseheart are considered from any family whose children are, for whatever reason, lacking a stable home environment. Mooseheart boasts its own U.S. Post Office and a fully functioning branch of Fifth Third Bank.

In addition to Mooseheart, Moose International also supports Moosehaven, a 70-acre retirement community near Jacksonville, FL founded in 1922; and conducts more than $90 million worth of community service programs annually.

Founded in 1888, the Moose organization has long offered its members an opportunity to do good for others while celebrating life, with family, social, and sporting activities. For more information on the Moose organization, visit the websites at www.mooseintl.org, www.mooseheart.org., www.moosehaven.org, or call 630-966-2229.