Unique in its design and powerful in its impact, "Every 15 Minutes" is an educational experience that reminds us all of the dangers associated with driving while impaired. The crash is staged, the emotions are real!  The Every 15 Minutes Program is conducted for our high school’s juniors and seniors. Can our community afford to ignore the devastating impact that driving while impaired is causing?

Life's lessons are best learned through experience. Unfortunately, when the target audience is teens and the topic is drinking and driving, experience is not the teacher of choice.  The Every 15 Minutes Program offers real-life experience without the real-life risks. This emotionally charged program, entitled Every 15 Minutes, is an event designed to dramatically instill teenagers with the potentially dangerous consequences of drinking alcohol. This powerful program will challenge students to think about drinking, personal safety, and the responsibility of making mature decisions when lives are involved.

We encourage you to watch the video taken from the Denbigh High School Crash

Every 15 Minutes video

The program is broken into two days.

During Day 1 of the program, designated "living dead" students are removed from the company of their surprised classmates by a fully-costumed Grim Reaper as an obituary is read for them by a uniformed Sheriff’s Deputy or Police Officer.  Later, the entire junior and senior classes witness the results of classmates who have paid the price for the decision to drink and drive by attending the staged accident scene (just outside of their school) and watching the effort to rescue and treat their classmates.  The "living dead" students spend the remainder of the day living the consequences at the hospital, morgue, funeral home, jail, and courthouse before spending the night away from their parents and friends, as newly deceased teens would.

On Day 2 of the program, the junior and senior classes reconvene for the mock funeral of their classmates and watch a video production of the events that took place off-campus the previous day.

The goal of the program is to encourage students to pause and consider the consequences of the decision to drink and drive in the days leading up to their prom and graduation.  Since the program's inception nationwide, the statistic of -somewhere in the U.S. someone dies of an alcohol related accident “once every 15 minutes" has improved to once every 37 minutes (NHTSA 2005).