Summit Goal: Reduce Distracted Driving

Ask Sarah Stevens if she is new to driving, and the Apple Valley High School junior will tell you that no, she's had her license for about a year now.

And that, in a nutshell, was the purpose of Thursday's Teen Safe Driving Summit at the Rosemount Community Center.

“One of our main goals is to try to get adults to understand teen perceptions, to try to understand teens' thinking,” said Gordy Pehrson, traffic safety coordinator with the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, who acknowledged that while a year of driving experience might not seem like much to a middle-aged adult, it was understandable that it might seem that way to a teen.

The fourth annual summit was a chance for students, educators and government officials to get together and talk about ways to keep teens focused on the road when they're in the driver's seat. The speakers at the event included law enforcement officials from three counties, as well as a man whose daughter was killed in a distracted driving accident in 2007.

Stevens was one of four students who provided candid answers to questions about not only their own driving habits and experiences, but what they've witnessed when they were in vehicles driven by their parents or their friends.

“My friends volunteered me,” is how Stevens described winding up on the panel, adding that she attended the event in the first place because “the school cop saw me doing a couple of iffy things when I was driving and thought it would be good for me.”

For other students, coming to the summit was a bit more voluntary.

Miller Greuenewald, a member of SADD at Woodbury High School, who also sat on the panel, gave an interesting answer when asked if he'd encountered any “speed bumps” since he'd gotten his license, saying that he hadn't gotten any tickets or into any accidents … “yet.”

“I'm just saying it's possible I could get in an accident sometime,” said Greuenewald, who has had his license for about six months.

The other two members of the panel were Kyrie Bossler and Julie Vance, two of a group of about a half dozen Lakeville North students who attended the summit. The Lakeville pair agreed on the best idea they heard at the summit.

“The idea to reach out to the middle school was cool,” Vance said.

“In Lakeville we hit the elementary schools and the high schools, but but the middle school,” Bossler explained. “Reaching out to the 'tweens' is a good idea.”

The Q&A with the students was just one of many approaches used at the summit to shedding light on the issue of distracted driving. In addition to many smaller group discussions, participants also had a chance to try out driving simulators, where the challenge was to try to text and drive in a controlled setting, and to try to catch balls thrown to them while they were wearing special goggles that simulated the vision impairments that alcohol can cause.

“I learned not to text and drive, and how hard it is to drive drunk,” Greuenewald said.

Rosemount High School student Jacquelyn Flemming said she was affected most by some of the videos she saw Thursday.

“I liked the videos of other people, to see what happened to them,” she said.

But of all the speakers and handouts, nothing at the summit was as powerful as a presentation by Vijay Dixit whose daughter Shreya was killed in a distracted driving crash in 2007.

Dixit spoke briefly about how the tragedy impacted his family, then played a short video that included comments from Shreya Dixit's friends and family members on the impact her loss has had on their lives, as well as information on the Shreya R. Dixit Memorial Foundation, which was established to, as her mother says in the video, “so that no other mom gets hurt like … the way that I am hurting.”