WEST DES MOINES, Iowa — Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird was at the West Des Moines Police Department on Tuesday afternoon, to announce a partnership with the National Child Identification Program.

“And in fact right now in Iowa we have 150 missing children at this very moment,” said Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird (R). “These kits will provide law enforcement 90% of the information they need to start looking for a missing child and every second counts.”

The partnership provides 456,000 kits to Iowa families for free, with the cost of $1.5 million covered by Alliant Energy and MidAmerican Energy Company.

NFL Hall of Famer and Chicago Bears Legend Mike Singletary was at the police department, emphasizing the importance of these kits for families. Singletary even had a close call of his own while on a trip to Germany with his seven children.

“And just like that I called out to my son, ‘John, John!’, you know and he’s kind of like you know, and the guy kind of took off,” said Singletary. “Just that quick something like that it can happen, it was a very real situation.”

The purpose of the ID kits is to be able to share the information with police if your child goes missing to expedite the response.

“If parents can provide a readily available child ID, upon determining that this is a possible abduction situation, it will enable law enforcement to have critical information necessary for their investigation,” said West Des Moines Police Chief Chris Scott.

The kits are free of charge and will be handed to every student, K-12, in the state over the next two months. The kits stay at home with the child’s guardians and are not collected into a national database.