Off-island program teaches students to stay SAFE

By Marissa Borja, KUAM News, Guam
Tuesday, November 08, 2005



With catch phrases like "Click It or Ticket" Guam's law enforcement officials strive to stress the importance of buckling up. This week however, a group of firefighters from off-island are here to emphasize this message by targeting students.

For the first time thousands of the island's students are being introduced to a worldwide program called SAFE (Stay Alive From Education). Premised on encouraging students to use their common sense or street smarts - the message from the team of firefighters from Florida is simple. SAFE executive director Vince Easevoli told KUAM News, "It's pretty sad when you go to a fatality crash and you see somebody killed because they didn't put on their seatbelt or they made a poor choice of getting in the car with someone that was under the influence. And hopefully we're making a difference by bringing our message of what we see every day and delivering it to students and adults."

Students at St. John's School in Upper Tumon quickly learned that part of being street smart is as simple as buckling your seatbelt. Despite using their humor to keep students engaged, the group realized that being safe is serious and far from a laughing matter. Using graphic images of real life trauma also helped the message of being safe hit home.

Fitted with a neck brace and placed on a stretcher, senior class president Sho Hammond even had the chance to experience what it'd really be like to be a victim of poor choices. "I wasn't planning on ever going through that situation but I could see what it was like for someone to go through that and it's not what I want to go through," he explained.

And if he wasn't always buckling up before, Hammond admits he's had a change of heart, saying, "I think they taught good lessons and I guess from now on I'll be wearing my seatbelt." Easevoli points out that it's this type of reaction that the program is looking for.

Explaining, he said, "Every time we do the presentation we always get comments like hey this is a great program or I didn't know this could happen, but what's even more rewarding is every year we'll get several stories where students will write back to us or teachers will contact us and tell us, 'I had a student that was involved in a really bad crash but because of your program they survived it.'"

With a number of other schools slated for presentations later on this week, Easevoli looks forward to spreading the word. "All of our instructors are currently assigned to their trucks and stuff so we're teaching from the heart and basically from our experience of what we see every day in the field," he said.

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