$8,000 grant entices students to buckle up, sober up

Georgia College has been awarded the Georgia’s Office of Highway Safety Young Adult Program grant for the eighth consecutive year.

GC will receive $8,230 for the funding of the Safe and Sound program. This program encourages seat belt usage and discourages dangerous alcohol use.

The grant was sought out by Barbara Funke, professor in the Department of Kinesiology. Funke passed the information she had gathered on the grant to Rachel Sullivan, the university health educator, in hopes she could carry the process out.

This is a common grant in Georgia according to Sullivan.

“A lot of colleges have it, a lot of police departments have it, and a lot of people who work with youth in general have it,” Sullivan said. “It’s designed to encourage seat belt use and encourage not using alcohol while on the road and making low risk decisions when using alcohol any time.”

The grant will be used to fund monthly events at GC, according to Sullivan.

“In September we did distracted driving, in October we did drunk driving awareness, and in November we’re doing driving-while-sleepy awareness, then from January through May we have five more segments that we’ll do,” Sullivan said.

The grant also goes to train the GC Peer Educators and any students interested in promoting health or wellness. The grant also funds any conferences they might attend.

Alcohol-free events, such as the drunk driving simulator on Front Campus, are events that are funded by the grant.

“It (the grant) is to support activities to talk to the campus community about the risk of drinking and also encourage seat belt usage,” Grants Compliance Manager Donna Douglas said. “My job is to make sure they spend it the way they said they were going to and that they follow GC and Board of Regents policy and most importantly the funder policy.”

This grant came with specific instructions of how it is supposed to be used.

“This is a very specific grant, it’s very detailed and anything you deviate from has to be approved in advance,” Douglas said.

Two of the requirements of the grant, other than it being used for seat belt awareness and safe alcohol practices, are for GC to hold educational

outreaches at least four times a year in one of the areas and to conduct seat belt checks twice a year.

According Public Safety Detective Michael Baker, seat belt usage is not a major problem at GC.

“We have low numbers, we don’t write a lot of citations for it,” Baker said.

Public Safety recently did a study to see how many students use their seat belts. Out of 200 vehicles observed, 81 percent of the vehicles’ occupants were wearing seat belts and the remaining 19 percent were not.

Posted by Alyson Crosby on Nov 10 2011. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.