Episode one
How these crashes actually happen
The everyday pedal error, parking geometry, and low-speed lot movement behind most incidents at child care sites.
Download the episode handout (PDF)A Storefront Safety Council partnership
A closer look at the curb, the lot, and the door your families use every day
Drop-off, pick-up, and outdoor play all happen within a few steps of moving vehicles. As a founding member of the Storefront Safety Council, ICP is offering 100 early childhood programs a free site safety risk assessment — a calm, practical review of what your site looks like from a driver's seat.
Every ICP assessment starts where families do — at the curb.
Why this matters
Most of these sites were never designed around a preschool day
A vehicle strikes a building somewhere in the United States about a hundred times a day. Most of those crashes are ordinary: a foot slips from the brake to the accelerator, a driver misjudges a parking stall, a car rolls forward in a lot at low speed. They rarely make the news, and they almost never happen because someone was careless with children.
Vehicle-into-building crashes
About 100 a day, nationwide
Working with the Storefront Safety Council, ICP reviewed more than 300 incidents that occurred at early childhood sites — child care centers, preschools, Head Start programs, and family child care homes. Roughly half of them resulted in injuries. Reading them together, the pattern was less about driver behavior than about geometry: where the parking faced, how far the walkway sat from the drive lane, whether anything solid stood between the two.
Incidents reviewed at early childhood sites
300+, about half with injuries
In a great many programs, the classroom wall, the nap room, or the fenced play yard sits only a few feet from a lane where cars back up and pull in all day long. That is not a failure of anyone's judgment. It is a condition of the building — and conditions can be assessed, documented, and improved.
The partnership
A founding member, bringing early childhood into the conversation
The Storefront Safety Council is the national organization working to prevent vehicle-into-building crashes. For more than a decade its members — traffic engineers, safety researchers, and attorneys — have studied why these crashes happen and what reliably stops them.
ICP joined as a founding member of its early childhood initiative. Our role is translation: taking what the Council knows about parking lots and pedestrian safety and putting it in the language of licensing, ratios, drop-off routines, and playground supervision.
Read why ICP joined the Storefront Safety Council
The series
When Cars Meet Classrooms
Three short conversations with Rob Reiter of the Storefront Safety Council, made for directors and owners.
Episode two
How design and architecture protect children
Site layout, sight lines, and the physical features that reliably keep vehicles away from occupied spaces.
Download the episode handout (PDF)Episode three
Protecting playgrounds and outdoor play spaces
What to look at where children play outside — fencing, distance from drive lanes, and the protection worth budgeting for.
Download the episode handout (PDF)The offer
100 free site safety risk assessments
Free for early childhood programs of every type — centers, preschools, Head Start and Early Head Start, faith-based programs, and family child care homes. There is no cost, no obligation, and nothing to install. You will need about twenty minutes and a few photos of your site.
Request your free assessmentWhat the assessment covers
- Drop-off and pick-up flow
- How families move between the car and the door, and where that path crosses traffic.
- Parking and drive-lane geometry
- Stall orientation, curb height, and what sits directly in front of a parked vehicle.
- Classroom and play-space exposure
- Distance and protection between occupied rooms, fenced yards, and moving cars.
- Practical recommendations
- A written summary you can share with your landlord, board, or licensing specialist.
- A documented record
- Dated evidence that your program reviewed its site and acted on what it found.
Duty of care
A written assessment shows the work you already did
When something happens on a site, the question that follows is rarely whether a program cared. It is whether the program looked. A dated site assessment, kept with your records, is a straightforward answer: here is what we reviewed, here is what we found, and here is what we changed.
It is the same habit as a fire drill log or an incident report — quiet documentation that a reasonable program keeps as a matter of course.
Explore ICP's Legal Preparedness trainingOne hundred programs will have a clear picture of their site. Yours can be one of them.
Request your free assessment