Pupils launch scheme against drunk driving

Press, 17 June 1988, Page 39

Pupils launch scheme against drunk driving

CARS

High school pupils throughout New Zealand are being asked to sign on the dotted line in a bid to cut the number of drinkrelated road deaths among young people. The scheme, called Students Against Driving Drunk (S.A.D.D.), is starting to filter into New Zealand’s secondary schools. Pupils and parents are being asked to sign a contract called "A Will To Live.”

It says: "I will not drive when I have been drinking, or travel in a car driven by someone who has had too much to drink.”

The contract is binding on both parents and their children.

The parents give an undertaking that they will collect their children, if asked, at any time and any place without question or argument at the time.

Alternatively, they undertake to arrange a taxi for their children’s safe return. Teenagers

undertake to respond to any similar request from a parent.

The S.A.D.D. scheme makes both parents and their offspring aware that each will help the other out of a potentially dangerous driving situation.

Teenagers are guaranteed “no questions, no arguments at the time” — ensuring they will not be lectured and possibly em-

barrassed in front of friends. “The idea is to allow them to talk about the problem before it arises,” said the Automobile Association Central’s traffic and safety manager, Mr John Strachan. The programme is funded by the A.A. During the May school holidays a start kit was sent to 400 New Zealand secondary schools, It outlines the four aims of S.A.D.D.: 9 To help eliminate drunk drivers and save lives. • To make college pupils aware of the drinkdriving danger. • To conduct community alcohol awareness programmes. • To organise peer counselling programmes to help pupils with concerns about alcohol. The push to spread S.A.D.D. through the country comes from Wanganui Girls’ College, where the scheme was introduced in 1986. Other schools are being

encouraged to set up their own pupil-based S.A.D.D. committees. The start kit outlines the problems schools are likely to face in getting S.A.D.D. accepted. Schools which set up S.A.D.D. committees can write to Wanganui Girls’ College for free promotional stickers, posters and copies of the “Will to Live.” The college has made inroads in getting the scheme accepted by senior pupils. Pupils through the United States and Canada are using S.A.D.D. to reduce drink-driving fatalities — the No. 1 killer of their age group. The programme was developed in 1981 by Robert Anastas, who was director of health education at a Massachusetts high school. And what of those youngsters who choose to ignore the “Will To Live”? Perhaps they would be better filling out another kind of will.