Child identification kits to be handed out at WVU -Rutgers game Saturday Mountaineer fans attending Saturday’s (Oct. 11) WVU -Rutgers football game at Mountaineer Field will have an opportunity to protect their children by picking up a free child identification kit as part of the American Football Coaches Associations National Child Identification Program.

Students enrolled in West Virginia University’s Forensic and Investigative Science Program and representatives of the FBI s Automated Fingerprint Identification Center in Clarksburg will be manning table width=100%s and handing out the free kits outside the stadium gates beginning at halftime and continuing through the end of the game.

The NCIDP kit provides parents and guardians with a clean, convenient way to record their childrens fingerprints and physical characteristics on a card they can keep at home. Each kit contains an inkless fingerprinting foil pouch; a clear, nontoxic fingerprint solution; and an identification card with step-by-step instructions detailing how to take a fingerprint, an area to practice fingerprinting, a standard fingerprint area that can be used by law enforcement, sections for recording childrens physical descriptions and identifying marks, space for current photographs and sections for recording a doctors phone numbers.

We are pleased to once again partner with the FBI and AFCA in providing fingerprint kits to parents and guardians of children,said Clifton Bishop, director of WVU ’s Forensic and Investigative Science Program.Handing out the kits at the football game serves as a reminder of how important the safety of children is and provides a means to help identify a child should some catastrophe occur.

The NCIDP was created in 1997 by the American Football Coaches Association as a community service initiative to help protect Americas youth and change the statistics related to missing children. According to the AFCA Web site, about 450,000 children run away, 350,000 are abducted by a family member and 4,600 are abducted by strangers each year. That is more than 800,000 children missing each year or one every 40 seconds.

Our kids are important to all of us, and thats why the American Football Coaches Association has become involved in a national effort to keep them safe,said WVU head football coach Rich Rodriguez.I hope all Mountaineer parents will take a few minutes and use these kits to help protect their children.

The NCIDP has become the largest child identification effort ever conducted. Since 1997, more than 10 million inkless child identification kits have been distributed by various organizations at football stadiums and in schools across the country.

In fall 2001, the FBI and NCIDP joined forces, allowing the program to supply identification kits to more than 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies across the country. The partnership decentralizes the fingerprinting process for law enforcement and greatly increases the number of children protected in each community.