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This week, the Associated Student Body (ASB) put on a Caltrans Safe Driving Week, an alternative to Every 15 Minutes that could potentially decrease the fundraising deficit.

Caltrans Week is an interactive competition where schools promote safe driving for a week and are judged on student participation.

Eight other high schools in California, including Ventura High School, are participating and $2,000 will be awarded to the winning school.

“Caltrans week is a one-week event that we are putting on in collaboration with Caltrans and Impact Teen Drivers in order to ensure the safety and awareness of distracted driving among our teens,” ASB vice president and event coordinator Nick Vaughan said.

Students can participate by playing the Distraction Zone game on their phones. As more students play, Foothill has a higher chance of winning. On Monday’s kickoff of Caltrans week, ASB distributed taco coupons to students who downloaded the free app.

The game is a simulation of driving down a freeway. Players must maneuver around obstacles such as construction zones, cars, and cones, all while staying at the speed limit. Extra points are awarded for dismissing a text message.

Students also have the opportunity to win $500 individually if they submit the highest score to Caltrans.

Vaughan called the event “a chance to be fun and interesting, while having potential to be more influential.”

He said that it is more “lighthearted” than Every 15 Minutes and is applicable to not only driving under the influence, but also distracted driving in general.

“Every 15 Minutes only focuses on drunk driving and does ‘one teenager dies from drunk driving Every 15 minutes.’ Research shows that there are more teenagers [who] die from accidents that involve distracted driving than there are students who die from an incident that has drunk driving,” ASB advisor Melanie “Captain” Lindsey said.

“This is a week that not only focuses on one thing, it focuses on all the things that could potentially be hazardous for teenagers while driving. It just doesn’t have that grotesque element to it that Every 15 Minutes does,” she said.

The leading cause of teen deaths in the United States is distracted driving. This includes being under the influence of drugs or alcohol, testing, adjusting audio, eating, or even reaching for a water bottle.

Vaughan broke his jaw last year after driving head-on into a telephone pole while reaching for his water bottle, which was spilling onto the carpet of his car.

Lindsey said that she lost two of her friends to a drunk driving accident during her senior year in high school.

In October, Lindsey drove six members of ASB to a Renaissance Conference and was almost involved in a distracted driving accident.

“A car had stopped in one of the lanes and we were on the freeway going 70 miles an hour, and fortunately I was maintaining a safe following distance, because this car was stopped in the lane, and another car hit it,” she said.

“It spun right in front of me, and I managed to avoid the accident because I was paying attention to what was going on. If I had been distracted, even minutely by changing the volume on the radio […] we could potentially have died.”

Vaughan stressed that what many people forget is that distracted driving also includes construction accidents. Caltrans justified this, reporting 38 traffic incidents at a single California construction zone within one month.

Caltrans has proven that 100 percent of distracted driving accidents can be prevented. Vaughan believes Caltrans Week will successfully raise awareness about the dangers of driving distracted, while potentially refurbishing ASB’s lost finances.

The loss of charging for parking on campus as well as lack of student participation in the Great American fundraiser has landed ASB in a multi-thousand dollar deficit. Lindsey said that winning the contest could potentially end ASB’s “Great Depression,” but that the subject at hand was also important.

“Kids don’t think that looking down at their cell phone is a big deal but it is,” said Lindsey.

On Tuesday a game of “red light, green light” took place on the quad, and distracted driving trivia was integrated into the game.

Wednesday afternoon, an obstacle course was set up on the quad. Participants had to maneuver through the course first distraction free, once with street delineators on their feet, and once more while attempting to compose a text message about Caltrans Week.

The three loops of the course were timed and narrated by Vaughan, and a new DVD player was awarded to the winner of the game.  Lunch began with sparse participation, but as Vaughan warmed up the crowd, students began to volunteer.

Freshman and obstacle course winner Karl Roth enjoyed the way the simulation was informative about not only texting and driving, but other road hazards like construction.

“[Teens] are new at driving and don’t know the real consequences,” he said.

On Thursday, the activities were more relaxed in preparation for Friday’s finale. An emotional poem on the effects of distracted driving was delivered by junior Liz Martinez and Ventura Police Department officer Officer Gomez displayed a car that had been wrecked in a distracted driving accident in front of Foothill.

ASB continued to advertise Distraction Zone and remind students to wear orange and blue on Friday.

Tomorrow, senior Jameson Ma’s public service announcement video on distracted driving will be played in class. Ma created the video for the Defensive Driving Scholarship, winning first place against 1,500 other applicants.

A representative from Caltrans will also come onto campus tomorrow in order to judge Foothill’s percentage of student participation in the game, quality of the message they are covering, and the creativeness of the usage of resources used to put on the event.

These factors will determine whether or not Foothill will receive the prize of $2,000.

Lindsey expressed that there was a lack of student participation, which could jeopardize the chance of Foothill winning.

“There is a lack of student participation. It doesn’t seem to matter what the kids do to try and get people involved, very few people are participating,” she said.

Vaughan believed that Foothill had a chance of winning.

“We’ve done so much promoting and advertising, we put a lot of messages out there, we put a lot of content out there. It’s up to the school to adopt it now, so if we can get more people to play the game tomorrow, I believe that we will win,” he said.

As the week nears its end, Vaughan decided that despite the lack of student involvement, affecting just one person would make Caltrans Week worth it because “the whole message was to prevent [accidents].”

“If I could possible have impacted one person’s life, had one person put down their phone, then every hour I’ve spent in ASB, every event we’ve put on, all the work I’ve done, it would all be worth it.”