For most teens, turning 16 means a chance at freedom in the shape of a driver’s license.
But National Safety Council statistics show that the 16th year of life poses the greatest danger of dying from a vehicle accident, said council vice president Alan McMillan. Vehicles–and their misuse–are the leading cause of death among those age 15 to 24, with drowning a close second and firearms mishaps placing third.
But by holding events such as Saturday’s “Focusing on My Future” at Roselle’s Lake Park High School, the Itasca-based NSC hopes to make the public more aware of the dangers that lie around literally every corner in America, McMillan said. The pilot event, the first in Illinois and the second in the country, is an effort to “get youth to take responsibility for their own behavior, to save their own lives,” he said.
More than 100 students attended the event at the school’s east campus at 6 N 600 Medinah Rd., listening to speakers, guiding a computer-programmed car that simulates drunken driving around a parking-lot course, watching vehicles perform skid demonstrations, examining police cars and large trucks and learning personal safety tips before adjourning for dinner and then a dance in the school’s gymnasium.
Many of the participating students were acutely aware of the dangers presented by vehicles. Within the last year, Lake Park students have died in auto crashes.
The drunken-driving simulator was especially jarring because drivers see exactly where mistakes are made, said sophomores Andrew Benko, 16, and Kei-Amber Johnson, 15. The simulator’s curving ride “feels fun, at first,” said Johnson, whose sister died last year in a vehicle crash. “But then it becomes scary; you have no control and you end up killing a kid. It opened my eyes even more.”
The firsthand experiences discussed by speakers and the demonstrations were much more convincing than the traditional drunken-driving tableau presented annually before prom season, noted sophomore Nick Kozin, 15. “You really learn more from someone who has the experience rather than a demonstration with crash-test dummies,” Kozin said.
Teens especially need to learn to make their own informed decisions about safety rather than to blindly follow a peer group, said motivational speaker Harriet Mauney Turk. “Don’t just follow someone else,” Mauney Turk, a former probation officer, told students. “That’s when we get screwed up. Remember, when those other kids take off their Nikes, they have the same nasty, smelly, stinky disgusting feet as everyone else.”
The message hit home for sophomore Veronica Dillard, 15. “You’ve got to be careful–don’t fool around out there,” she said. “Life isn’t a game.”
The NSC will survey the participants to find out what lessons were most effective, said Lori Tietz, NSC spokeswoman and member of Lake Park’s parent organization. But the success of the event was already deemed immeasurable.
“We’re not going to know if we’ve saved a life today,” Tietz said, noting that statistics don’t reflect such things. “We can only hope that we do.”