SADD week of events
Shannon LeClair – Times Reporter
Students Against Drunk Driving, SADD, had a variety of things going on at Strathmore High School, SHS, over the week of May 31 to June 4.
SADD members and their coordinator Amy Dzus wanted to raise awareness about the risks of drinking and driving, especially with grad coming up.
“This year we decided to do a whole week of grad activities instead of just one thing,” said Dzus.
SADD has been run at the school for a number of years, and Dzus has been in charge for three of them. There is a SADD Alberta website where members can bounce ideas off of each other, but it is up to each school to decide what they will do. On May 31 at SHS, there were suckers being handed out with a tag on them which read ‘don’t be a sucker, don’t drink and drive.’ After school on Monday night, the SADD members put masking tape outlines of dead bodies around the school. The outlines had drunk driving statistics in them, so when students came to school Tuesday it was one of the first things they saw.
Const. Ric Gill, with the Strathmore RCMP went to Calgary on Tuesday and picked up the roll over simulator.
The rollover simulator is the cut off front half of a pickup truck, attached to a big trailer. There are no windows in it, and there were three manaquins inside, one with a seatbelt on, two without.
“Basically what it does is simulate being in a collision at different speeds, with and without your seatbelt, it’s to show people what it’s about and why they should wear their seatbelt,” said Gill.
“This is one thing you don’t want to miss. It really hits home what happens when you’re drunk and driving,” said SHS student Brittany Anderson.
“Even at a slow speed the two keep falling out.”
There were also six sets of impairment goggles, which belong to the Strathmore RCMP detachment, brought to SHS to show the kids the different levels of impairment. Each pair of goggle simulate a different level of Blood Alcohol Content, BCA, which gives the feeling of being drunk.
“They show you how dizzy you can get, and your depth perception,” said Gill. Students lined up to try on the goggles and walk the straight line, which was taped to the sidewalk.
“The higher the BCA, the more drunk you feel, you get a headache and get really dizzy,” said Anderson.
Thursday was the whiteout. Students came to school with their faces painted white, and met Dzus before class for a sign stating they were killed by a drunk driver. This was the first time a whiteout had been done in a few years.
“The way a SADD whiteout normally runs is, every 13 minutes I think it is, someone comes in and grabs a student out of class and paints their face white to represent that every so many minutes in Alberta somebody gets killed by drinking and driving,” said Dzus. This was found to be too disruptive to the classrooms, and so this year students were given signs and took a sort of vow of silence to recognize the people killed by drunk drivers. Throughout the week there was also a raffle being hosted, tickets sold for 1 for $2 or 3 for $5, and the prize was a 16g IPod. Darlene Reynolds, a member of the main office staff, won the IPod. SADD raised $137 with the IPod raffle and, together with the money raised from the Wake-a-thon hosted earlier this year, are donating $300 to the Alberta Adolescent Recovery Center (AARC) in Calgary.