Breanna

Alberta

Issue: Impaired Driving
Why? It’s a big problem in my hometown.  Students openly brag about doing it and I’m scared for everyone’s safety.

What issue did you choose to address in your Action Plan? Impaired Driving.

Why did you choose that issue? It’s a big deal in my home town.  Fellow students at my school will brag about how drunk or high they got at a party, then brag about how they drove home that night and don’t even remember it! It’s terrifying hearing that. Not only does it make me worry for their safety, but it makes me worry for anyone else on the roads and myself. It scares me so much that if I know of a party going on, I won’t go anywhere that night.

How are you going to address the selected issue?There are many ways I can go about addressing this issue, but there are three main ways I think would be the best. First of all I would like to start raising awareness about it to the students at my school. To do this I am joining up with a leadership group at my school. With their help, we can spread awareness to the students at my high school.  This can be achieved by simply just making a presentation with statistics about driving while impaired and showing it to the students in my school. True this may sound a bit dull but in order to make it a bit more interesting, the day of the presentation, I could host what is called “White Out Day.” What is white out day? It’s a representation of how often someone in Canada dies due to impaired driving. In North America it is estimated that one person loses their life due to drunk driving every half hour. With that information, every half hour throughout the school day I will pull someone out of class and paint them white and send them back to class. That student is now forbidden to speak to anyone until the presentation.  This could really shock a lot of the students and hopefully make them think twice about driving home impaired.

Making partnerships could really help me in taking action with my issue. I could make partnerships with local radio stations so I could broadcast announcements and encouragements to not drive while impaired, especially on holidays. I also could partner up with adults and parents and create a list of numbers for a DD service.

My final way I would like to address this issue is creating a fake scene/ scenario where a student gets in trouble for drunk driving and “injures someone”, this I guess would “scare” students out of driving home from a night of partying.

What do you hope to achieve in the next year? Over the next year, my main goal is to at least make a change in someone’s life. If I can convince at least one person to be smart and not drive impaired. If I can do that, they may change another person’s life and soon enough, it could potentially spread like wildfire.

What progress have you made so far? Unfortunately things haven’t gone as I had hoped so far. Making plans is a lot easier to talk about then actually put into action. It’s very tough to try and schedule out my time and others time so we can take action. We have managed to put up flyers up in our hallways to encourage grads to be safe and not drink and drive. Because the school year is almost done, the group I am currently working with has decided we are finished for the rest of the year and will resume at the beginning of the next school year.