Community Impact

On my sixteenth birthday, I felt that having a car provided independence and freedom. Reflecting on that now, as a senior in high school, I see that driving a car is a huge responsibility that requires respect and maturity. During my junior year in high school, I was impacted by experiencing the deaths of peers when involved in vehicular accidents. This prompted me to further investigate the statistics of teen drivers and fatalities related to speed, phone use, and drug/alcohol consumption. The results of my investigation were alarming, and I wanted to help with the prevention of such tragedies.

I live in a rural community with a large high school population who have no access to public transportation. This forces the parents to make a decision: continue to provide the only form of transportation to their teens or prepare them to become drivers themselves. Because we live in a rural community, there are no street lights or sidewalks, which further limits the options for transportation, such as walking and/or riding a bike. Walking to a destination or riding a bike could be very dangerous at certain times of day or year, as the winter months cover the trails with ice and snow. Also, our rural community is quite large, and often, the teens’ destinations, schools, fast food restaurants, grocery stores, and gas stations are several miles away. It would be unreasonable to encourage teens to walk or ride their bikes to such destinations. The most popular decision is to provide sixteen-year-olds with vehicles, which leads to the majority of these teens driving often unsafely throughout the community. Although the law requires each teen to complete courses and pass a test, many do not realize how one single bad decision while driving can impact a person’s life indefinitely.

Colorado law requires first-time drivers to obtain a driver’s permit first and practice driving with a licensed adult for the first year while also taking courses in driver’s education. The state also demands that first-time drivers have 10 hours of supervised driving with a third-party company acknowledged by the state as a reputable company. Once these requirements are met, the first-time driver takes a test at the DMV and must have a passing grade before receiving a license. These requirements were implemented to help prepare any first-time driver with the necessary skills to safely operate a vehicle. However, the development of a teen’s brain does not process information the same as a mature brain, that of an adult of 23 years of age or older. This impacts their decision-making skills and can then cause careless mistakes behind the wheel. The other factor that can impact a teen’s decision-making while driving is simply the lack of experience behind the wheel. One cannot expect that a 16-year-old will have the same type of decision-making skills as a person who has had more than two years of experience in driving. Ultimately, this all indicates that teens who decide to drive at sixteen need ongoing education and real-life experiences to better understand the type of responsibility driving a vehicle really is.

I was provided the opportunity to impact the entire student body by organizing an event with the help of the school’s administration and community. This event involved asking the first responders within our community to talk about their experiences with accidents involving teens. I realize that we all have experienced the tragedy of losing several of our peers to vehicular accidents, but it is difficult to envision how it impacts the first responders who not only have to take care of the victims on the scene but also have to deliver the difficult news to the families. I felt that it was important for teens to hear how going over the speed limit just one time could change a person’s life forever, but also how that can impact an entire community. I believe that increasing awareness of the responsibility of driving is key to preventing accidents among teen drivers. The Pueblo County Sheriff’s Department and firefighters volunteered their time to come to the high school and speak at a school assembly. I felt that organizing this type of event was my obligation as I was in a program (DECA) that allowed me access to both the school’s administrators and community with the support of my teachers and parents. I feel passionately about this topic after this community suffered five teen deaths within a semester, I do not want to see another empty seat at graduation representing a student who didn’t make it due to a vehicular accident. Graduation should be a time of joy and a right of passage to all who have earned it, and I want to see all of my classmates make it to that point.