Teens show a drive for safety

Seminars aim to reduce traffic deaths with a peer-centered approach

RALEIGH -- Clarence Witherspoon is a senior at Mary E. Phillips High School and is about to inherit his mother's 2004 Ford Escape.

He knows the importance of safe driving because his friend, Wakefield High School senior Sadiki Young, was killed last year in an alcohol-related car crash after leaving a party.

Now Witherspoon, 17, wants to spread the message about good driving to his peers.

On Tuesday, he joined more than 100 local high school students at a "Keep the Drive" seminar sponsored by the Allstate Insurance Foundation, where he learned how to approach other students and talk about safe driving.

But this was no adult-style seminar in some dreary hotel ballroom. The event was held at Marbles Kids Museum and led by Andy Berndt, 26, and Sarah Rado, 24, from the Allstate Foundation. They brought the facts and statistics down to the teenage level, including audience cheering, an interactive video and attempts at comedy standup.

"So far, it's been informational," Witherspoon said just before the participants made posters and wrote parodies to popular songs to promote safe driving.

The seminar focused on the number 14 -- the number of young people killed in car wrecks nationwide each day. Students were also told that most wrecks are caused by distractions, like texting, and speeding - not drunk driving.

The Triangle area has been especially hard hit with teen driving deaths. During the past 18 months, four Princeton High School students and one recent graduate have died in crashes. A half-dozen Wakefield students died in car accidents over the past few years. And just this past weekend, Jarret Satchell, 18, a recent Wake Forest-Rolesville High School graduate, died early Sunday morning in a single-car crash in Wake Forest.

After all the teen deaths in Johnston County, County Commissioner Tony Braswell is spearheading an effort to figure out how to stop the young drivers from dying in car wrecks. In the coming weeks, he will gather state and county agencies, including the state Highway Patrol, the N.C. Department of Transportation and Johnston County Schools, to try to determine what's causing the deaths and, he hopes, to come up with solutions.

Berndt, a young hipster who wears corduroy pants and white earrings, helped create Allstate's "Keep the Drive" program, targeting it specifically to young people: no scare tactics and no talking down to teens.

He has traveled the country for the past three years meeting with high school students to create a safe-driving grass-roots program. Teens who attend the seminars are expected to take the message back to their schools by hosting assemblies, passing out fliers or holding rallies. Monetary awards await students who do the best job.

Berndt said he likes this work because it affects kids immediately.

Cigarette smoke, he said, will kill you over a period of years; "teens crash and could be killed right now."

Rob Foss, of the UNC-Chapel Hill Highway Safety Research Center, said these kinds of programs are done all the time, but they are not very effective.

"Programs like these are not the sorts of things that produce a change in behavior," he said. "Are they educational? Yes ... Does that translate into safer driving? Usually not."

One factor that does produce results is less driving, he said. For example, schools could make students stay on campus for lunch.

"Driving under pressure at noon is a dangerous thing we can control," Foss said.

At the end of Tuesday's program, students were into the idea of preaching safe driving as they gathered in groups to color posters and write parodies.

One Enloe High School group wrote theirs to R. Kelly's "I Believe I can Fly."

"We believe we can try," they sang. "We believe we can save some lives."