The Children's Safety Olympics is a preventive project that was developed in 2006 by the Maribor Police Directorate and has been successfully organized every year since then. Every year, they organize a competition for fourth-graders of primary schools, who compete against each other in knowledge in the field of safety and various skills. In addition to the police as the main body, other institutions also participate in the project, which in the environment where we live and work take care of safety in the narrower and broader sense.
The main purpose of the Olympics is not competition, but playful and fun acquisition of useful knowledge about safety concerns and self-protective behavior
Teams of primary school pupils - each team consists of ten pupils and a mentor - first participate in preliminaries, from which the three best teams qualify for the grand final.
There is no lack of good will for the competitors
The children compete in several fun "disciplines" or games (the "man don't get angry" game, assembling logos of intervention services from large cubes, skillful bicycle riding, fire drill or pumping water with a "brentača") and at the same time answer questions about general, fire and cyber security, road traffic safety, etc. In this way, they compete to see who knows the most about identifying, preventing and eliminating the consequences of everyday dangerous situations, and they can also show how skilled they are and how well they handle group work.
During the breaks, the various intervention services that take care of safety are presented: in addition to rescuers, firefighters, soldiers and representatives of the Administration for Civil Protection and Disaster Relief, there are also police officers of various specialties: motorcycle police officers, police dog handlers, mounted police officers and others.
Part of the project is also Štengijada, a competition with a humanitarian purpose
The Children's Safety Olympics also includes the Štengijada competition. It involves running mixed triples up 455 stairs ("štengah") to Kalvarija, the hill above Maribor.
The open championship of Police Directorate Maribor is also the national police championship, where competitors compete for the big transition cup. However, teams of police employees are each time joined in the competition by "external" competitors: retired police officers, colleagues from the army, customs, fire brigades, emergency medical aid teams, teams from primary and secondary schools, private companies and others. Each competing triple consists of representatives of both sexes.
In addition to sports and social activities, Štengijada also has a charitable aspect, as the entry fees, in cooperation with the Association of Friends of the Youth Maribor, have traditionally been earmarked for vacations for children from socially disadvantaged families who would otherwise not be able to afford it; the funds raised are solemnly handed over to them at the final event of the Children's Safety Olympics.
