The people who wrote this must not have kids. :)
All of my old smartphones become PBS Kids devices until they are destroyed. Then they get recycled. Except for the one we lost on a plane. I hope whoever found it found a good use for it.
I'm glad you are reusing your smartphones.
It's me. I wake up in the morning, have coffee, put on my pants, then go to court and formally complain about things like this all day.
2) It can get you angry, threatening call-backs from the authorities.
3) It can make annoyed and/or on-guard (because there might be an actual emergency of unknown nature) cops show up at your door—and if it happens more than once, there may be legal consequences in play, and possibly even the first time if they're in an especially foul mood.
Consider that a young kid might well dial it over and over not even realizing the call's going through (if they don't know what it looks like when the call's been answered, and are used to speaker-phone mode and video calls and aren't used to putting the phone to their ear, which is true for a lot of young kids these days).
It's probably fine for most 7+ year olds, but PBS Kids has a ton of content targeted much younger, and even kids 4-5 years old can usually learn to use the app pretty quickly.
There's a faq on the 911.gov site advising parents to take the batteries out of phones they give to young kids, for this exact reason. It also advises that, if you accidentally call the number, you stay on the line to explain what happened so it's not mistaken for a real call, rather than hanging up—young kids are highly likely not do to this, and to instead hang up or just leave the line open without saying anything.
Yeah, sure, do whatever I guess.
More importantly, is there some kind of pattern of it that warrants...a response of some sort?
This sounds like kids getting poisoned from Halloween candy, which happened once from the kid's own parent.
(And I taught them how to do this on my phone as soon as I thought they were old enough to do it, around 4.5y, in case something happened to me while I was watching them.)
To accidentally call 911 they'd have to find the dialer, and press 9-1-1 in the right order. At this point they're old enough to know better, and before they were old enough, they didn't know what it was, so doing it maliciously would be unlikely.
Also since the phone is on airplane mode, they'd also have to disable that first, because even emergency mode doesn't work in airplane mode.