The students at Bright Beginnings Preschool have been learning about community helpers over the past few weeks and on Thursday morning they got to meet a member of the Andalusia Police Department and a team from Advanced EMS.

“The past three weeks we have been learning about community helpers,” Bright Beginnings’ Amy Norris said. “We have talked about all kinds of different community helpers, and part of that has been police and EMS workers. For some of these kids, they only experience they might have with police or EMS has been a negative one when something was wrong. We wanted to show them the positive side as well.”

The kids split into groups with some starting with a tour of the ambulance and others checking out the police car.

Tommy Wright and Terry Stevens showed the kids around the back of the ambulance where Stevens told the children about the different medical devices they use. Wright showed the children the front of the ambulance and allowed them to talk through the loud speaker and turn on the sirens.

Officer Kevin Norris of the Andalusia Police Department gave the children a tour of his police car and told them about being a police officer.

“I think it’s a good thing for the kids to see the good in law enforcement,” Norris said. “With everything that’s going on and with police being portrayed as bad, we want the kids to understand that we are here to help them. We don’t want them to be scared of us, and we want them to be able to come up and talk to us.”

The children will continue to learn about community leaders and next week will get a visit from the Andalusia Fire Department.