Crash course: Dangers of texting and driving simulated at Bellaire High School

Elizabeth Brewer, The Record-Eagle, Traverse City, Mich.
·2 min read

Jan. 31—BELLAIRE — Everyone texts and drives, Bellaire Police Chief Bill Drollinger said. But the important thing is to change these habits while people are still young.

Thanks to a $3,000 check from the Bellaire Fire Department, Miles Hunter from the "Save a Life Tour" spent his Monday morning teaching ninth through 12th graders at Bellaire High School just how dangerous distracted driving can be.

Hunter brought in a driving simulation machine and handed each of the students a phone that sent them continuous text messages as they tried to navigate the course while responding to the stream of texts.

"The thing I like to hear the most from students after they're done is, 'Wow, that was way harder than I thought,'" Hunter said.

For sophomore Alana Elandt, Hunter certainly found the answer he was looking for.

"It showed me what texting while driving can really do to you," she said after crashing the car about five seconds in to the simulation. "Oh yeah, it was way harder than I thought it would be."

Ninth grader Marley Aslpaugh agreed. She said the simulation was fun, and taught her just how easy it is to crash when trying to type out text messages and drive.

Texting and driving is something that local law enforcement and EMS said they see quite frequently after crashes.

Ben Slagle, medical captain for the Bellaire Fire Department said getting the funding to bring "Save a Life," into the schools was an easy sell to the department.

"Everyone was really on board with it," he said. "This was a program that we kind of stumbled into, and we thought would be cool to bring to the kids."

This is the first time local law enforcement has run a program like this with high schoolers, he explained. When planning today's events, he said they realized each year they dedicate a whole day to go to the elementary school and talk about safety, but had nothing in place for older kids.

When Slagle first heard about East Jordan High School hiring the same program, he thought it would be great for their community as well.

"This is something that we deal with quite often," Slagle said of crashes resulting from texting and driving. "This is something that is a huge problem."

According to data from the National Safety Council, texting while driving increased more than 120 percent in the last decade. The U.S. Department of Transportation reported that in 2020, "distracted driving" claimed 3,142 lives.

Drollinger and Slagle did not have data on texting and driving in Bellaire, but Drollinger noted that some of the young drivers he saw this morning have already had minor crashes as a result of texting and driving.

He's hoping those numbers will drop after Monday's event.