Anson High School students were given a safety message April 18: don’t text and drive.
Students gathered in the gym before the school day ended to listen to Chad Brokaw, the commercial spokesman for Alltel Wireless, urge them not to text behind the wheel.
“Do whatever you need to do to get the message across,” athletic director Fred Davis told Brokaw, adding “adults are just as bad.”
The message comes just in time for prom, which Brokaw often used as a reminder of the fun things students could miss out on if a tragic accident cut their life short. He also listed other aspirations like graduation, future careers and time with friends, families or a future spouse.
“We all do it,” Brokaw said. “You know it’s wrong.”
He urged students to make a pledge to not text while driving for at least 30 days. He told students to visit www.focusdriven.org/pledge-today to make the pledge. He told students to make texts before they drove or to pull over and shared that he had nearly hurt someone texting while driving.
Brokaw bantered with students and included them in his pitch, as well as taking questions.
Virginia Tech Transportation Institute found in a 2009 study that truck drivers were 23 times more likely to get in a “crash or near-crash event” while texting. The same study found that texting took a driver’s attention off the road for 4.6 seconds on average, long enough to travel 100 yards at 55 miles per hour.
Post a Comment
