Students Find SADD Awareness Week Is a Sobering Experience

The Walton Reporter
By Patty Lollot
4.19.2006

FRANKLIN – Franklin Central School’s Students Against Destructive Decisions (SADD) held an Awareness Week a the school from April 7 to 14.

The focus was to help educate students and encourage them to make positive choices in their lives, specially when it comes to the often-deadly choices involving alcohol use.

On Thursday, the school’s SADD Advisor Suzanne Swantak, partnering with the Delaware County STOP-DWI Coordinator Lisa Barrows and N.Y. State Trooper Melissa Swislosky, the school resource officer, offered a “Fatal Vision” program for students in grades 9 through 12.

“This event is timely, because it’s just before the senior trip, the prom and graduation,” said Swantak.

The “Fatal Vision” activities included having the students wear “Drunk Goggles”, goggles which diminish their visual acuity and perception and facsimilate different degrees of alcohol impairment or intoxication.

The students wore the goggles and attempted activities such as trying to walk a straight line, heel to toe, dribbling and passing a basketball and most dramatic, driving golf carts through a course of cones. While it appeared to be all fun and games, with the students laughing at each other and their inability to do simple activities, the lessons learned were sobering.

Later, an assembly was held with the main speaker being David Allen. Allen lost his son, Dave a FCS graduate and a first class airman in the Air Force, in an alcohol-related motor vehicle accident.

“The choice is yours,” Allen told the students in a compelling account, complete with power point slides of his son in happy times, as well as at the scene of the crash and his death.

Allen said that the Jeep Laredo in which his son was a passenger went airborne after speeding and hit a tree. “It was unidentifiable after the crash,” he recalled, as the slides of the crash appeared on the projector in the school gymnasium. Vodka and beer bottles were found in the vehicle.

“Lousy choices were made,” said Allen. Those lousy choices included drinking, getting into a vehicle with someone who has been drinking – and then driving.

Allen said that approximately 100 lives of family members and friends were affected by the accident.

“My friends in the fire department had to come and tell me my son was killed in a car accident,” he said.

According to Barrows, we make hundreds of choices each day, from the moment we wake. “Wrong choices have a negative result,” she said.

Statistically, Barrows said the 18,000 people die each year in alcohol related deaths. “That’s one every 30 minutes.”

She said that minors consume 35 percent of all wine coolers and 1.1 billion cans of beer and that before a person is 18 years old, he or she sees over 100,000 beer commercials.

Also, at the assembly was Casey Jo Scaccia, who made a pledge not to drink until the age of 21 because of alcohol-related problems in her family. Scaccia races a 20-foot dragster, a car that is now sponsored by the county’s STOP-DWI program.

She also takes it to parades, fairs and other events as a symbol of sobriety for her peers.

“To drink, or not to drink, can be life altering,” concluded Barrows.