It was a cool February morning, and I was waiting for the bus at the top of my neighborhood. It seemed like any other day. My younger brother Sam and I talked to our neighbor and my best friend in middle school, Sierra. But the conversation found itself in a lull as we were all sleepy and the chilly wind cut through our clothes. It was mornings like this that made you wish something would magically happen and you could go back home and curl up in your bed rather than stand in the cold.
We watched the road in silence, in wait for the bus that promised warmth and open seating. The best part of the morning ride to school was that we were the first kids to be picked up, so I got to choose whichever seat I wanted.
I could hear the bus before I could see it come around the bend of Brown’s Bridge Road. The brakes squealed as it rounded the corner and slowly came to a stop in front of the opening to our street. The three of us started our walk to the bus, but we only made it halfway there before there was a disruption.
A loud, metallic, scraping sound stopped us neighborhood kids in our tracks. A car had driven directly into the back of our school bus! It was a smaller car, and the entire front hood was now crumpled underneath our bus.
The only reason the driver had missed the big, yellow bus with flashing red lights was because he was on his phone instead of watching the road.
We stood in shock as we watched the man process what he had done, phone still in hand. He stared straight ahead, and without even glimpsing at us, started to reverse his vehicle out of the crash. He then put his car into drive and sped around our parked school bus. The driver chose to flee the scene, crossing the bridge and seeking safety in the next county over.
The rest of the morning went by in a blur. Sierra grabbed her grandma since she her house was closest. I called Sam and I’s Mom at work.. The bus driver got out and called the police. I was the only kid who paid attention to the license plate of the other car, so I tried my best to relay that back to law enforcement. The once mundane and dreary February morning turned into a memory I am still astounded by today.
It was determined that the bus was unsafe to pick up more students. There wasn’t a lot of external damage, but we couldn’t tell if something might have happened internally. The school said the bus was to come back immediately for repairs, and all students along the route had an excused absence.
I had wanted a reason to miss school, but watching someone destroy their car and endanger their life had taken the joy out of the excused absence.
Ever since then, I knew I didn’t want to make a stupid mistake like that man and risk the life of myself and others. Luckily, the Georgia Hands-Free Law was passed only a few years after this incident. I feel a lot safer while driving because I know distracted driving is not permitted in my state.
However, not all younger people have thought about the impacts their distracted driving could have. To help raise awareness of the dangers of distracted driving, I think people should go through driving training like the one I had before I could get my driver's license.
In Georgia, after you get your learners permit, you must go to a driving course to better prepare you for having a license. The course I went to was at my high school over the summer and was led by local law enforcement.
One exercise we did in this course was driving a golf cart through a maze of cones. It wasn’t extremely difficult, just a big loop. All the students got to do the drive once without distractions. Next, you were told to pull out your phone while you drove.
My friends in the class and I decided to text each other, and we quickly learned that being on your phone while trying to drive was extremely difficult and dangerous. The messages I tried to send from behind the wheel of the golf cart were jumbled and misspelled. I drove off course and knocked over a lot of traffic cones. The same goes for my friends and every other person in the class. One girl went so off course she drove straight through the cones and got two stuck under the golf cart.
Another thing we did in this driving course was look at videos and pictures of car crashes. The police officers told us that if we felt sick or upset we were free to leave but everyone staid and learned from the footage. I think it was tough to watch, but it would be worse to not take driving seriously and end up in an accident like that yourself. Seeing real life examples can help young people take driving seriously, especially if they’ve never seen an accident or been in one before.
I am glad that I live in a state with the Hands-Free Law and is serious about education drivers on how to be safe. After seeing people make mistakes in driving because they were using their phones, and the driving course I took, I will never be a distracted driver. If other young people took a driving course like I did, I think they would swear off distracted driving too.