Businesses, governments, and schools have long understood that one way to boost achievement and promote compliance is to shine a spotlight, to publicize lists of who qualifies for a status, who has followed the rules or who has not. Businesses post the names of employees with perfect attendance records. Governments publish the roll of who is behind on property tax payments. Schools print their honor rolls in local newspapers. Public recognition is an incentive to do the right thing, while public reckoning can be a powerful deterrent.
Back in the good old days – the 1990’s and before – such publicity primarily involved newspapers and bulletin boards, but in recent years, of course, it has migrated to websites. Perhaps the most prominent and earliest example of government use of a website as a deterrent has been registries, publicly available lists, of where convicted sex offenders live.
So, the Web it now is, and I believe it is now safe to assume that every high school in the U.S. has at least a modest website. Offering one bit of confirmation of this phenomenon, USA Today reported last week that schools districts around the country are considering paid advertising on their websites as a way to help meet their budget deficits. The article
(March 18, 2010, p. 3A) quotes administrators as targeting businesses whose products promote education or safety.
Why then can’t we use school websites to help promote safer teen driving?
Many schools already do, in the sense of announcing safe driving events such as a guest speaker, the schedule for driver education classes, or a school-wide safe teen driving poster contest. My suggestion here, however, envisions a step beyond these merely informational messages: using the website to shape behavior by shining a spotlight on legal drivers, good drivers, and maybe even bad drivers.
Consider these potential additions to high school websites, presented here in ascending order of boldness and (I agree) potential controversy:
- a list of each student who has had his or her license long enough to carry passengers legally (many Graduated Driver Laws now specify a period of no passengers for newly-licensed drivers, followed by several months of “immediate family only,” and then unrestricted passengers);
- a list of each student who is now permitted to carry passengers and, since getting a license, has not been convicted of a moving violation or other serious misconduct;
- a list, regardless of how long since licensing, of every student who has been convicted of a moving violation or other misconduct (which, of course, includes any type of impaired driving); or
- some combination of these lists.
I hope that the potential benefits of these website lists are obvious. First and foremost, a critical piece of information for parents of students at every school where kids are allowed to have cars – which in many suburban high schools is the vast majority of juniors and seniors – is who is legally permitted to carry passengers. In my previous blog post, “I Give My Child Permission To Drive With . . .,” I spotlighted the issues for schools and parents that are embedded in the forms by which parents allow their kids to be driven to or from school, or to or from school events, by other students. Shouldn’t these forms and decisions be accompanied by confirmation about which students are legal chauffeurs, and which have not been convicted of a violation? And doesn’t this information cry out for a centralized, electronically-accessible list?
What about the administrative burden of collecting and maintaining this list? Well, yes, it will probably take someone on staff a few hours to compile the initial list and a few minutes now and then to update it, but I doubt that the time required will be significant, and in any event, the safety benefits and greater peace-of-mind should make it worthwhile. Moreover, I highly suspect that, at least for options 1 and 2 above (allowed to carry passengers, or allowed plus no violation) can run on a self-reporting basis. Students and maybe even parents will consider adding their names to those lists a type of mini-graduation, an announcement that Teen A has climbed another step toward adulthood. Thus, all that may be needed is for the school to establish the list and explain how to add a name and the date on which the student “became legal.” There could be some work involved if a student already on the list is convicted of a violation and should have his/her name removed, but presumably this would be a relatively small number.
I recognize that the third option, posting the names of every student convicted of driving misconduct, will be more controversial, especially among parents, and involves a problem of how schools will obtain the information. In some states, such a list might require a change to the teen driver laws. But I ask this question: Many schools now impose penalties such as revoking privileges or stripping students of leadership positions for drug or alcohol violations or other egregious behavior. Why not serious driving misconduct? Speeding? Texting while behind the wheel? Drag racing? Is it more important to regard a student’s driving record as a matter of personal privacy than to alert fellow students and parents to which teen drivers have not yet gotten the message that driving is the leading cause of death of teenagers in the U.S.?
Dedicating a small corner of a school website to a list of drivers who can carry passengers, and/or so-far have been safe or unsafe drivers is not a cure-all. In particular, simply because Student A has now had a full license long enough to carry passengers and has managed this initial period without a violation does not, by any measure, ensure that we now have a reliably safe or experienced driver, as other posts on this blog explain in detail. Yet, the primary goal of this blog is to help parents make better decisions about when their teens should get behind the wheel or should get into a car when a teen will be behind the wheel. In this regard, high school websites offer a low-hanging fruit, a relatively simple way to provide helpful, timely information to parents that will help them make these better decisions.
