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.

History
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 was in Chico which was presented by the Chico Police Department in 1995.

Planning
The Every 15 Minutes program starts months in advance of the actual presentation. This includes all of the involved agencies, students, and administrators from all schools getting together, and planning the event. This includes the selection of the students to be involved in the program.

First Day
The day of the presentation starts with a student being removed from class, immediately after the start of the day. Following that, an additional student is removed from class every fifteen minutes. The students that are pulled from class are not allowed to return until the following day, and spend twenty-four hours in a retreat, along with police officers and volunteers. Sometime during the day, usually around 10 a.m, a traffic crash is simulated, on school grounds, which involves some of the students. In the planned crash, at least one of those volunteer students is "killed". The simulated crash is handled by the responding agencies, such as police, fire, and medical services. The drunk driver, played by a senior, is arrested by the local police agency. The agencies play out a real scenario of the response to a drunk driving crash, in front of all the students. After the crash scene, the rest of the day will continue with students being removed from class every fifteen minutes for the rest of the day.

Second Day
The second day of the program involves a school assembly in which the involved students return to school. At the assembly, there are different speakers from the community that address different aspects of alcohol related crashes. These can include first hand events, or the perspective of alcohol related crashes from first responders. In addition, the involved students comment on their experiences, as well as some of the parents involved.

Questions Concerning Effectiveness
Studies that have tracked students before and after the Every 15 Minutes program have shown that the program may have a favorable short-term effect on students' stated attitudes but no effect on actual behavior. This has led to charges that the Every 15 Minutes program is similar to the controversial DARE anti-drug program in that it produces the appearance of addressing the problem but does not produce the desired change in behavior.

Questions have also been raised about the basic premise of the program, that one person dies every 15 minutes in an alcohol related accident. The NHTSA reports that in 1995, the first year the program was presented, the rate was actually one death every 30.4 minutes in the US. This was using the NHTSA's very broad definition of "alcohol related" wherein the accident was defined as "alcohol related" if any person involved had a blood alcohol level of 0.01% or higher. The legal definition of intoxication in the US is 0.08%. This rate of alcohol-related fatalities has remained almost constant over the last decade and is now one death every 31.1 minutes.