Golden Apple: Kelliher Students Learn About Seatbelt Safety & Distracted Driving

Kelliher Schools students are learning all about the importance of seatbelts thanks to their fellow peers. This week, the middle schoolers were given the lesson through a video and a written project.

“You’re supposed to draw a picture of what the causes can be on one of them, and then you have to write messages about what the causes can be on the other piece of paper,” says Myah Lossing, co-creator of the Heads Up Seatbelt Safety project.

“A lot of kids wrote that they could hurt their family members. They could lose everything. They couldn’t walk,” adds Rylee Neft, who also created Heads Up.

Lossing and Neft led the Heads Up Seatbelt Safety presentation as a part of their project for “Family, Career and Community Leaders of America,” or FCCLA.

“These kids are in a leadership program for FCCLA. They’re supposed to be doing things that affect our community, our school, people anywhere. So we have lots of different programs going on,” says Clare Kupcho, the FCCLA advisor for Kelliher.

The girls have been spearheading seatbelt safety seminars at Kelliher since October. They’ve made t-shirts, brought a sheriff to the school to talk, had an Instagram challenge, and much more.

“They’re goal was to have about three to five, six presentations which they’ve definitely met their goal. They did quite a few different things,” says Kupcho.

Neft adds, “In November, we did one about seatbelts and we did this activity where they sit on scooters and they have to text a message while going out to the gym and we had balls thrown at them.”

Next week, the girls will present their seatbelt project at the state completion for FCCLA in Bloomington. They says they’re excited to show exactly what they taught fellow students.

“One of the big messages I hope got through their head is that doing just the littlest things can distract you, and it can have the biggest impact on other people and themselves,” says Lossing.