5 Impaired Driving Prevention Ideas for High School Teachers
High school teachers play a key role in preventing impaired driving among students. Here are five effective strategies to encourage safer decision-making.
Key Takeaways
- Guest speakers , like RCMP officers or MADD representatives, can effectively communicate the dangers of impaired driving to students.
- Promoting safe transportation alternatives helps students understand the importance of avoiding impaired driving.
- Establishing a “Students Against Impaired Driving” chapter encourages proactive, student-led initiatives.
- Using impairment goggles demonstrates the impact of alcohol/drug use on physical abilities.
- Incorporating real-world scenarios and statistics into lessons emphasizes the seriousness of impaired driving.
If you came of legal driving age in the second half of the last century, you undoubtedly remember seeing driver’s education movies that showcased the dangers of drunk driving and other unsafe driving behaviours. Perhaps you can recall the whir of the film projector and the often-graphic shots of traffic crashes and their aftermath with film titles like:
- None for the Road
- Death on the Highway
- The Bottle and the Throttle
- Safety or Slaughter
- Wild at the Wheel
- Signal 30 (a police code word for “death on the highway”)
- Go Sober and Safe
- Semi-Conscious: Driving in the Real World
- Options to Live
Or maybe you remember some classic lines of stern narration like:
- “A nice shiny car, a few drinks, a beautiful summer day: a combination that ended in death.”
- “Was it her pretty face that made this gaping, jagged hole in the windshield?”
- “Consider the possibility that every other driver you meet on the road may be drunk, blind, or just plain stupid…”
- “These are the sounds of excruciating agony. There are no words to describe the agony. There are only sounds.”
Whatever the case, the shock value of using graphic car crash films to encourage young drivers to avoid risky driving behaviours like drunk driving appears to have been negligible. Impaired driving fatality numbers in North America rose steadily until the early 1990s. By this time, stricter laws, significantly increased enforcement, public awareness campaigns, and enhanced police breathalyzer usage started to prove effective in deterring impaired driving.
However, impaired driving remains a leading cause of teenage deaths and injures thousands of teens annually. Given that impaired driving impacts Canadian youth in communities across the country, high school teachers have a vested interest in teaching their students to avoid impaired driving. But when it comes to impaired driving, what are the best ways a high school teacher can instill responsible decision-making in the minds of their students? Since the shock value of gory drunk driving crash movies apparently failed to prevent generations of youth from driving while impaired, what teaching resources should a teacher turn to?
With unique insight into why a person might put themselves and others at risk of death or injury by their impaired driving—not to mention the distinct possibility of a life-changing DUI arrest and conviction—the Greater Toronto Area defence lawyers of TorontoDUI have some ideas. Here are five impaired driving prevention ideas high school teachers can use with their students.
1. Bring Guest Speakers into the Classroom
A guest speaker changes the routine and cadence of the classroom, and a great one can capture the students’ attention to impart their messaging effectively. Your local Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) detachment might be happy to send an officer to your school to help teach students about the dangers of impaired driving. RCMP officers can describe the impaired driving carnage they’ve had to respond to and detail all the negative impacts a student might face if they’re pulled over for a DUI. Additionally, an officer can explain that police have more resources than ever to recognize, stop, and detect impairment levels in drivers they see on the roads. All in all, RCMP officers can deliver powerful anti-impaired-driving messaging that might make your students think twice before getting behind the wheel while impaired.
Organizations like Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), or anyone you know who has been directly impacted by the negligence of an impaired driver, can also deliver powerful messaging on the issue.
2. Promote Safe Alternatives to Impaired Driving
You know that your students are not legally able to consume alcohol or drugs, and they know it, too, but don’t take a “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” approach to the issue. Instead, don’t be afraid to periodically reference the fact that some students might be inclined to drink or do drugs over the weekend in context with asking them to think twice about the risks of impaired driving. Continuously deliver the message that if any of your students do plan to drink alcohol or consume drugs, they should always have alternative transportation in mind, whether via a designated driver, public transportation, taxi, or ridesharing service.
3. Establish a “Students Against Impaired Driving” Chapter
If your school doesn’t already have one, consider collaborating with some of your students to establish an Ontario Students Against Impaired Driving (OSAID) chapter. All it takes to get the ball rolling is to find a few leadership-minded students interested in helping protect their classmates from the dangers of impaired driving. OSAID takes a proactive approach in empowering student members and their teacher advisors to become powerful advocates against impaired driving. This includes offering OSAID chapters a wide range of impaired-driving educational resources and support for student-run anti-impaired-driving campaigns.
4. Simulate Impairment
You can give your students a first-hand experience of how alcohol and drug use may affect coordination, sightlines, reaction time, and overall ability to drive safely with impairment goggles. Also known as “drunk goggles,” these devices mimic visual intoxication to give students a demonstration of how impairment compromises physical reflexes. You can have the students try different activities while wearing the goggles to show how impairment affects simple tasks. For example, have them “walk the straight line” and perform other physical tasks that a police officer might have them do during standardized field sobriety testing. Oh, and if your school has an OSAID chapter, the organization has an impairment goggle loan program .
5. Use Real-World Scenarios and Statistics in Your Daily Lessons
As a teacher, you can bring real-world news and data into your classroom as part of daily lessons. For example, if you teach mathematics, you can ask your students to calculate various blood alcohol concentrations to show them how much—or little—alcohol it might take to make a driver impaired. If you teach social studies or similar discipline, don’t hesitate to use local news events about alcohol- or drug-related traffic accidents or arrests to stimulate classroom discussion about why the incident happened and what it might mean for those affected.
We trust that these five tips will help you instill responsible decision-making behaviours in your students regarding impaired driving. However, if one of your Greater Toronto Area students is arrested for DUI, help protect their future by encouraging them to secure legal representation from a skilled DUI criminal defence lawyer, like those at TorontoDUI .
