Dental Students Help to Identify Missing Children
When Kimberly Haynes (SDM’09) heard that the National Child Identification Program (CHIP) needed help from dental students, she jumped at the opportunity.
CHIP is a community service initiative that aims to improve the statistics on missing children in the United States, where one child goes missing every 40 seconds, according to the organization’s Web site.
Haynes and other members of the Goldman School of Dental Medicine chapter of the Student National Dental Association (SNDA) took dental impressions and mouth swabs of participating children at a CHIP event held in September at Roxbury Community College. The program provides identification kits for parents and guardians to collect detailed information on their children. The information helps authorities find the children if they go missing. Other volunteers took fingerprints as well as video and voice recordings of the children.
This was the first year SNDA volunteered for the annual event, and Haynes, the group’s vice president, plans to participate again. “It was a great event and well organized,” she says. “Its purpose was phenomenal.”
SNDA members participate in numerous other community service activities throughout the year, Haynes says, to gain experience and to support one another.
Rebecca McNamara can be reached at ramc@bu.edu.