Teens Take the Wheel at Safe Driving Summit

More than 120 teens along with parents, educators and traffic safety advocates from across the state descended on the Busch Campus Student Center at Rutgers University earlier this month to participate in the first summit designed to help teens and their parents learn about New Jersey's Graduated Driver's License Program (GDL).  

 The Teen Safe Driving Coalition in partnership with the Allstate Foundation, the National Safety Council and DCH AUTO GROUP presented the first New Jersey Teen Safe Driving Summit.

Teens from local Students Against Destructive Decisions (SADD) Chapters made up most of the presentations. Workshops were broken into Teen Only and Parent Only workshops. It was teens talking to teens about traffic safety in true peer-to-peer fashion without adults influencing the presentations.  

Parents, teachers and school officials from 15 different counties were also in attendance and participated in workshops designed to help them better understand the risks for teen drivers and how the principals of the GDL can help reduce those risks. The principals help to ensure what amounts to further use of the GDL acronym -- Good Driving for Life.

The ice breaker was conducted by Dr. Jim McCall of Rowan University. He handed out a paper with a list of 25 unsafe driving activities and asked the audience to Find Someone Who Never. The audience was then invited to circulate the room and collect as many signatures that they could of people who never did one of the 25 things listed. (This writer is ashamed to say I could only sign one item on that list).

The keynote speaker was Cara Filler, an internationally recognized speaker on the issues of peer pressure, traffic safety and youth leadership. Filler talked candidly to the audience about the tragic death of her identical twin sister, Marin, who died in a motor vehicle crash just one day after the girls' celebrated their 18th birthday.  

A powerful moment came when Filler asked the audience to close their eyes and imagine the most important person in their life and then imagine what their life would be without them.  Then as they were thinking about that person they listened to a video, a traffic safety commercial from Canada in which a teenage girl holds the hand of another girl who was fatally injured in a car crash.

Towards the end of the summit, the teen workshop facilitators and keynote speakers gave their summaries of the event and raffles were held with some of the attendees winning tickets to Great Adventure, gift certificates for gas, Amazon, Best Buy and other great retail establishments, all privately donated for the summit. Attendees were invited to participate in social networking and to try out a behind-the-wheel driver simulator in the parking lot of the campus.