Hampton Roads, VA schools are educating teens on the dangers of texting and driving

As the realization that teens and cell phones go hand in hand, schools are scrambling to education teens on driving while using their cellular device.  Local schools are trying to find the most effective ways to teach teenagers the importance of staying focused on the road rather than their phones while driving. 

The most important thing is to relay a message that resonates with the students.  The majority of teens feel they are invincible and don’t take any message seriously.

Under the Commonwealth of Virginia’s new text message law, which went into effect July 1, sending text messages is a secondary offense.  That means police can only write texting tickets for offenders that they happened to pull over for another reason, like speeding or running a stop sign.

Sherrie Bollhorst, who oversees the driver’s education curriculum for Hampton Public Schools, said that division is in the final stages of crafting a student-and-parent rights and responsibilities handbook for driver’s education students. The handbook will include a section on the dangers of texting and driving, and both parent and student will have to sign it before a student can get behind the wheel, Bollhorst said.

The handbook is a way of being more proactive and getting parents to buy into the safety factor with their children, she said. That’s particularly important when it comes to texting, because many of today’s teen drivers have grown up seeing their parent’s texting on the road, Bollhorst added