Honored for promoting teen driver safety

The scenario is tragic, gruesome and perennial. A high school senior, all of 16 or 17, gets a driver’s license. His or her proud parents hurry out to buy their child a new car –– perhaps a fast car. Within days or weeks, the teen is dead, killed in a fiery wreck.

Maybe the teen was drinking and driving or texting and driving. Perhaps he or she was driving too fast and lost control of the vehicle and slammed into a tree or guardrail.

Ten years ago, Bellmorite Wendy Tepfer, executive director of the Bellmore-Merrick Community Parent Center, decided that she had seen too much carnage on the roads. She needed to act. “I felt we needed to do something proactively rather than reactively,” Tepfer said.

And so she created the Driving in the Safe Lane Program, with help from Saul Lerner, the Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District’s health and athletics director; Dr. Lucy Weinstein, director of injury prevention at Winthrop-University Hospital in Mineola; and Thomas Gilberti, a Nassau County police officer.

The program goes beyond dry statistics. Through terrifying videos and personal testimonials, it aims to show teens the dire consequences of irresponsible driving.

For her efforts to increase safe teen driving, Tepfer was recently awarded the Governor’s Traffic Safety Council’s 2011 Chairman’s Award.

A release from the council reads, “New teen drivers and their passengers face the highest rates of crashes, injuries and death. Risk factors include inexperience, relative biologic immaturity, peer pressure, distractions and low seat-belt use.

“The Community Parent Center’s Driving in the Safe Lane Program,” the release continues, “is a successful, multi-faceted presentation that addresses these risks using a community partnership model that includes the education and health communities, as well as government, law enforcement and industry.”

Driving in the Safe Lane began in the Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District. Attendance at the presentation was voluntary for students and their parents. Later, the district required attendance by both students and parents. Otherwise, the students could not receive school parking permits in their senior year –– considered prized possessions by students.

Driving in the Safe Lane is now in about half of Nassau’s 57 high schools.

“Wendy has become a leader in New York state in teen driver safety,” Lerner said of Tepfer. “Her acts are unparalleled in the state … I’ve known what Wendy has done for a long time. I was incredibly pleased what the state recognized her with.”

Lerner said that the objective behind the Driving in the Safe Lane program is to bombard young people with safe-driving messages, similar to the way they have been surrounded by anti-smoking messages for the past two to three decades, which clearly have had an effect, illustrated by the dramatic drop in smoking among young people in recent years.

“If we save one life,” Tepfer said, “then we’ve done our job.”