DISCOVERY : KID PRINT

Carol Stockdale is an affable, organized, articulate woman, conversant in everything from politics to insurance to society’s ills. But Kid Print is her baby, and like a new parent with a wallet full of baby photos, she loves sharing information about it.

“I recommend fingerprinting for children of all ages,” said Stockdale. “And it’s not so much that fingerprinting is going to protect kids, it’s that by fingerprinting their children, parents will become informed about abduction prevention.”

When parents bring their children to a Kid Print booth at a fair or other event, they receive a “Child Safety and I.D. Kit,” which is a booklet containing cards for emergency child identification tags, medical information, places for photos, a lock of the child’s hair, physical description, and dental records. There is also information on what to do when your child is missing, safety rules for parents, and abduction precautions.

Kid Print is a nonprofit organization that began in 1985 largely as a Cub Scout project and mushroomed into a national organization that fingerprints and establishes identification records for children and educates parents on how to prevent abduction.

And as successful as it is, getting it off the ground was not easy. “It’s kind of funny how we got started,” said Stockdale. “My husband and I were drafted for a service committee of the Cub Scouts. I had seen a segment on (the television show) ‘Real People’ on fingerprinting and thought, ‘Why don’t we fingerprint kids?’ ”

But after contacting several police departments and being greeted with, “You want to do what?,” Stockdale and husband Gary contacted the FBI, which saw the merits in the idea.

So the Stockdales and a team of volunteers headed for Los Angeles nearly a decade ago and spent eight hours with the FBI taking a crash course on how to take “10-finger-roll prints,” which are the only kind that can be classified on a computer. Ever since that class, Kid Print has been off and running.

“Once, when we first started, we held a fair at the Buena Park Mall. We must have fingerprinted over 1,600 children,” said Stockdale. “It was nonstop all day long for two days straight.”

Police departments and private firms often charge up to $15 per child for fingerprinting, but Kid Print’s services are free. Volunteers from an eclectic variety of professions--business, law, education, plus others--staff phone lines and do fingerprinting. The expense of fingerprint ink pads, supplies, printing, gas, insurance and the like, is covered by donations and fund-raisers. And corporations such as Vons, Royal Crown Cola, Pizza Hut and Red Onion Restaurants often host a kid printing event and underwrite the costs.

Telephone: (714) 828-3200

Miscellaneous Information: Kid Print also sponsors a 24-hour hot line for parents searching for run-aways and children abducted by non-custodial parents or strangers: (800) 962-9202.