AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM SANDY STEVENS, OWNER, STEVENS ADVANCED DRIVER TRAINING

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Inevitably one begins to twist the facts to suit the theories."
-- Arthur Conan Doyle

Everybody has a pet theory for reducing youthful driver crashes. Stern lectures, seatbelt law enforcement, draconian restrictions, jail time, scary films, crashed cars on display in school parking lots, parental liability, appeals to reason, various forms of hands-on training, licensing at 17 or 18 instead of 16, breathtaking insurance premiums, peer pressure, bake sales.. The list is endless, and all are well-intentioned, except maybe the insurance premiums. But the problem has remained persistently intractable for over 50 years.

We began the SkidSchool essential skills development program for youthful drivers in 1996, working with Cooperative Insurance in Middlebury, VT. The core skills of the program were taken from our Police Emergency Skills Training at the Vermont Police Academy, now in its 28th year. Our goal was twofold; to produce newly licensed drivers who could be depended upon to handle an emergency such as a deer in the road or a car running a stop sign in front of them from the first day of their driving careers, and to produce new drivers whose judgment and decision-making skills reflected a maturity we expect from adult drivers with good driving records. Knowing that certain kinds of training, such as skid-pad training or any kind of competitive driving, has been shown to produce highly skilled but more aggressive drivers with worse than average crash records, we did two things. First, we narrowed our program to include only essential avoidance skills, and used those training experiences to reinforce broader safety themes, such as seatbelt use and the dangers of distractions. Second, we kept records. Our current study by the Vt. Center for Justice Research is a two-year look at 142 youthful drivers either on permits or within weeks of licensure at the time of training. The study is comprised of a representative social and economic sample of Vermont teens who were trained in April, 2006 in Barre-Montpelier. We won't have the full results until this summer. But Robin Adler of the Vermont Center for Justice Research did report to us that not one of the 142 drivers was the at-fault driver in a police-reported crash in the first six months of the study.

The current study confirms what we have seen for years from the data of our oldest clients, who are primarily from the risk-management side of insurance companies that specialize in law enforcement and municipal training.

To us, crash-reduction is the only measure that matters. A program that has no specific data proving that its drivers crash less often and less severely than others may or may not be effective. But without that data, it's hard to justify commitment to a theory, however well-intentioned. You can sit in on that training in this seven-minute video. Youth Safety Council Video -- Sandy Stevens, Owner, Stevens Advanced Driver Training

Why do we lose so many teens to fatal car crashes each year?

Our national driver's education system teaches new drivers the rules of the road, but overlooks the fact that teens need more than just classroom instruction and a few hours of driving under normal road conditions. Teens need hands-on experience to prepare for the real dangers of driving.

Why is it that car crashes, which are the leading cause of death for teens, get little to no national attention?

Car crashes kill over 6,000 teens each year, and seriously injure 300,000. With numbers this outrageous, it's shameful that we don't search for the cure the same way we do with so many diseases that kill just as many. The difference is that the cure can be as easy as half a day.

When will we replace apathy for this serious problem with a passion and a drive for change?

The truth is car crashes are not inevitable. They are not a part of the learning process, and we want to prove it to you.

With the help of communities throughout New England, Skidschool has changed statistical outcomes and outlooks of thousands of young drivers. It is our goal to not only make this life saving training available to every teen, but to change the meaning and perception of safe driving. Let us show you how.