It's back-to-school season! In cities and towns across the country, parents and kids are out shopping for school supplies, making sure everyone's ready to head back to the classroom. The products they're buying are safer than they were a generation ago thanks to important safety protections we’ve built over the past four decades and recent improvements in those standards.

This week marks the fourth anniversary of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA). Not only has the law made cribs safer for infants and toys safer for American children, it has also helped students heading back to school.

Under the law's lead standard, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has worked with companies to pull hundreds of thousands of hazardous school-related items from store shelves and catalogs because of excessive lead in the products. These include particular unsafe brands of:

• Pen and pencil cases
• Children’s art easels
• Biology education kits
• Educational craft kits

Parents and teachers have been able to quickly learn about the dangers of these and other products through the CPSC’s product safety and consumer complaints database, SaferProducts.gov.

Back-to-school time can be a hectic one for both parents and kids, and they shouldn’t have to worry about whether or not the school supplies they purchase are safe. Unfortunately, we've learned we can't always rely on manufacturers to do the testing to ensure their products are kid-friendly and risk-free. That's why we need government oversight – to make sure all the products sold to American families are safe. Thanks to the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act passed four years ago, families can rest easier and students can go to school ready to learn – an example of government working for everyday people.

Image by flickr user o5com, used under a Creative Commons license