This past Thursday, Connecticut’s safe teen driving community gathered for a “Summit,” a gathering to update everyone on what is going on around the state, and to raise awareness with the hope of increasing collaborations. It had been five years since we had such a gathering. About one hundred of us convened in Windsor, CT at a Travelers Insurance facility. The event was bubbling with ideas and energy, and in the view of everyone who attended, a great success. A written summary will be forthcoming, but today I want to spotlight what emerged as the main focus and comment of the day: the benefits of, and the opportunity for improvement in, Connecticut’s requirement that teens with a learner’s permit attend a two hour class, with a parent or guardian, to learn about safe teen driving.
When the legislature went along with the recommendations of the 2007-08 statewide Task Force on Safe Teen Driving and made the class mandatory, there was plenty of pushback and grumbling from parents, and uncertainly among legislators. Last week, however, we heard Neil Chaudhary of the Preusser Group, a nationally prominent traffic safety research firm, report that in a recent survey, 90 percent of parents who have attended the class have found it beneficial — a remarkable turn around and testament to public acceptance.
When I speak about teen driving outside of Connecticut and talk about the two hour class (I say “the deal in CT is that if you want to put your 16 or 17 year old on the road, we need two hours of your time to talk about safety”), there is often disbelief. When I spoke in Missouri in September, my hosts admired that Connecticut has set up this mandatory class, but they told me candidly that such a class would never be possible in their “more government is not the solution” state.
Anyway, at last week’s conference, one point of consensus among attendees was that this two hour class is a goldmine, a legally-mandated structure for communicating to parents and teens the risks and danger of teen driving and how to deal with them. The focus at our meeting was how to improve and standardize it. We heard from researchers at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center who have studied how the class is conducted at driving schools around the state. They told us that the class does well delivering information about the State’s teen driver laws, but not as well, for example, with how and why inexperience is a key risk factor for teen drivers.
Thus, one of the takeaways from this meeting is that Connecticut is onto something with this class, but needs to work to improve its content to make sure that it delivers the best information possible — to its admittedly captive audience.
