Lane Ranger:

STUDENT ROAD SAFETY HAS A TIMELY MESSAGE

With spring break, prom season and graduation right around the corner,
there's an effort in many metro Atlanta high schools to get out the word
about safe and sober driving.

On a perfect spring day at Grayson High School in Gwinnett County, students
were excused from classes to learn about the consequences of bad decision
making.

In one area of the football field, they could don goggles that did a
masterful job of simulating impairment and try to navigate a golf cart
through a line of orange cones. At a second station, two Gwinnett DUI task
force officers talked tough about drinking, driving and drugs. State
troopers and Gwinnett hospital personnel displayed graphic pictures of
teenage crash victims.

"Everyone seems to take a real lax attitude during prom season," said Bill
Stevens, director of community policing for the Duluth Police Department.
"And spring break is coming up. It seems to be a right of passage for
teenagers to get out and get drunk and get behind the wheel."

Stevens has joined forces with other agencies to spread the word in
Gwinnett and across the state about Operation Drive Smart, his teenage safe
driving campaign.

It has evolved from humble beginnings. Officers, firefighters, paramedics
and others are less likely to play Officer Friendly these days. They've
replaced talk of abstinence, which many teens tune out, with a message of
don't mix drinking or drugs with driving.

Gwinnett DUI task force Officer M.T. Lawler showed the students how he
conducts field drug tests. He said more than one student had failed and it
wasn't even 11 a.m.

"A couple of kids have shown positive signs of having smoked [marijuana] in
the last couple of hours," he said. "That's one of the trends --- to get
high before school."

The field tests, by themselves, weren't conclusive and the teens
volunteered to take them, so Lawler took no action against those who showed
signs of drug use. But the exercise proved a point.

If kids are doing drugs before school, he said, it stands to reason they do
drugs before hitting the road with friends. Get in a crash and kill
someone, he and partner Dave O'Hare warned, and you're looking at 15 years
in prison.

A lot of kids used the time to cut up and talk. But many said they got the
message.

"I know a lot of people who do things they shouldn't do," said Toni
Bartolotta, 16, a sophomore. "I'm driving and it's a dangerous position to
be in, but you have to learn sometime."

"You realize what you might end up looking like if you drink and drive,"
senior Tamaron Tutt said after looking at the accident photos.

Teens' high crash and death rates have affected nearly all the adults
involved in the Grayson teen driving expo.

"Several students of mine have died since I've been in education," said
Bryan Long, Grayson's ninth-grade administrator. "One student killed his
best friend in the passenger seat. He was speeding and ran a red light."

"It happens all the time," said O'Hare, the DUI officer. "We have to peel
kids out of cars, even after we've had to cut them open, because they've
been drinking or doing drugs.

"It's not fun to knock on a parent's door and tell them their son or
daughter is not coming home."