Every 15 Minutes

Every 15 Minutes is a two-day program focusing on high school juniors and seniors, which challenges them to think about drinking, driving, personal safety, and the responsibility of making mature decisions. Along with alcohol-related crashes, it focuses on the impact that their decisions would have on family and friends.

The Every 15 Minutes program originated in Canada and was soon adopted in the United States first in Spokane, Washington. The site of the first Every 15 Minutes program in California was in Chico which was presented by the Chico Police Department in 1995.

The Every 15 Minutes program starts months in advance of the actual presentation, in fact the very first program at a school will take about one-year to plan and prepare. This includes all of the involved agencies, the police, fire department, paramedics, hospital, court, lawyers, judge, jail facilities, coroner/funeral home, students, parents and school administrators. Student participants are selected to cover the full spectrum of the student body, thus, the audience will be able to relate to at least one of the participants on the crash day.

Due in large part to major grants and guidance by the Highway Patrol, the program has made its way to even more students' hometowns. In recent years, the California Highway Patrol has continued to fine-tune the Every 15 Minutes program, which has always been over two-days - day one being the crash, with day two as the assembly, featuring speakers ranging from the student participants and their parents to motivational speakers, relatives who have lost loved ones in drunk-driving crashes (there are no drunk-driving "accidents"), medical personnel, lawyers and law enforcement officials.

In southern California the program has also been modified by a civilian coordinator who has taken the audience away from watching on the sidewalk to sitting in bleachers, allowing for better viewing; eliminating the grim reaper (often viewed by students as unreal); and adding a texting element to the sober driver. This element brings the program added reality, as current figures indicate more teens are being killed in text-related crashes than in drunk-driving crashes. However, the grants are dedicated to drunk-driving and would be eliminated if too much emphasis was placed on texting. To still maintain the drinking emphasis, it is mentioned that the sober driver could have lessened the severity of injuries or death had they been concentrating on the road and not on the phone.

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