High school students from across Wellington County have made it clear what distracted driving means to them.
In February students at Norwell, Wellington Heights, Centre Wellington and Erin secondary schools were invited by Safe Communities Wellington County to create a 60 to 120 second video describing their views on the hazards of distracted driving.
“We didn’t say anything about texting and driving specifically, we said ‘what does distracted driving mean to you?’” said Safe Communities Wellington County program co-ordinator Christine Veit.
“And so it could be anything from texting and driving to eating while driving, putting on your makeup while driving, doing any number of things.”
The contest closed on April 18 and the first and second place winners for each school were announced in May. The winners for each school include:
– Centre Wellington District High School: Megan Allison and Madeline May (first prize) and Teaghan Laitar and Layla Stork (second prize);
– Norwell District Secondary School: Breanna MacDonald, Breanna Frey and Luke Whale (first prize) and Jennifer Gibson (second prize); and
– Wellington Heights Secondary School: Josey Rooney (first prize) and McKenna and Taija McGovern (second prize).
At Erin District High School students did not fulfill the necessary criteria to qualify for the competition.
Once the individual school winners were chosen, all six videos were reviewed by a group of people who represented different aspects of Wellington County, Veit said.
The winner was announced at Wellington County council on June 21. The winning video was created by Allison and May from Centre Wellington and received six votes.
The second place winners were Laitar and Stork, also from Centre Wellington, and they received five votes. The other four videos received one or two votes each, Veit explained.
“The outcome is to raise awareness because … unfortunately a lot of …. teenagers and young adults think that they are able to text and drive or text and walk or even text and ride their bicycle and we wanted to raise their awareness,” Veit said.
“Instead of us telling them the statistics they found it out for themselves.”
She also said the project reached far more youths than just the students producing the videos.
“Even though [it] may have been two girls that were the masterminds behind it they ended up getting a lot of their friends involved,” Veit said. “So it wasn’t just those 20 videos and those 40 kids, it was even more kids that were involved.”
The winning video shows what happens when a boy calls his father to ask him to pick up milk while the father is driving.
The videos will be used as an educational tool for Safe Communities Wellington County.
Veit said the plan is to possibly expand the program next year to allow county students going to school in Guelph to participate.
Visit goo.gl/sqjxtb to view the first and second place videos.
