Various community partners will be coming together on May 1 to help educate Grade 10 students at Olds High School about the dangers of texting or drinking and driving.
RCMP, members of the Olds Fire Department, emergency medical personnel, health-care workers, Chinook Arch Victims' Services volunteers and funeral home staff will gather to show about 150 students the consequences of poor decisions while behind the wheel. While the Prevent Alcohol and Risk-related Trauma in Youth (PARTY) program has been offered in Olds in the past, this year's program is quite extensive.
“We targeted the Grade 10s at the school because of the fact that they're generally getting their (driver's) licence throughout the year in Grade 10. They're new drivers and having an experience to understand what does texting and driving look like,” said Lana Cissell, a parent volunteer who helped organize the event, which has been in the planning stages since September 2012.
“This is the first year that they've done a program in this sort of a comprehensive fashion,” said Cissell.
The students will be seeing a crash site set up at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and the aftermath of the crash. Students will then be going to one of two trauma rooms set up at the Olds Hospital and Care Centre and seeing how medical staff deal with the aftermath, as well as presentations by emergency medical staff and physiotherapy staff.
Older students will be portraying the victims in the crash.
“They go through the day and they see, well, what does it look like when you actually are in an accident and maybe you have to re-learn to walk or something very major. Or maybe you're left a paraplegic and what does that look like and what would the rehab look like,” Cissell said.
Another station will be set up at Heartland Funeral Services. Students will tour the facility and learn how staff prepare a body for a funeral. The RCMP will also talk about what they have seen when attending crashes.
After the students have gone through all the stations, they will be served lunch at the Olds College Alumni Centre, where volunteers will give them a chance to experience what it would be like to eat lunch with various forms of disabilities. A guest speaker, Doug Manderville, who is a paraplegic, will also be speaking to students about his experience having been in a crash.
