Spring 2016 - Finalists

'Dog Bites' by Dawn Cowan

Have you ever been bitten? I don’t mean by a fly or other insect. I mean by a dog. I have. My family has bred and shown purebred dogs my entire life. I have handled everything from a Miniature Longhaired Dachshund to the dreaded “Pit Bull” (American Staffordshire Terrier) and Rottweiler. None of those dogs are the ones who bit me. I was bitten by a Chihuahua and I deserved it. Over four MILLION people get bit by dogs every year. How many of those people could have saved themselves the pain and occasionally death, by following simple safety rules? How many dog’s lives could be saved?...Read more »

'The Three-Stage Process to Ending Distracted Driving' by Evan Kaufmann

Driving while blindfolded is dangerous. You probably won’t ever hear a sane person argue with that statement. Nevertheless, at any given moment, hundreds of thousands of drivers across the U.S. are doing essentially the same thing: operating a vehicle while not looking at the road in front of them. It’s a sobering thought. It’s called “distracted driving,” and incidents have reached such pandemic levels that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that nearly one out of every five car accidents involves a distracted driver...Read more »

'Cell Phone Usage While Driving' by Nathanial Kern

Cell Phone usage while driving has become a safety risk epidemic that stretches across the entire nation. Although research has shown that the younger generations are more apt to use cellphones while driving vehicles, the fact of the matter remains that the wide spread use of cellphones while driving has led to accidents and deaths on the roads that make up our ground travel systems. To make the roads safer to this end, it is important to know the dissemination of cell phone usage across different age groups and ethnicities, the stastics backing how cell phone usage while driving causes distracted driving issues, and the methods that are being used to help resolve these cellphone related distracted driving issues...Read more »

'Distracted Driving - My Story' by Brittany Larsen

Technology. Increasing the conveniences of living one day at a time. The first official cell phone was invented in 1973. However, it is unlikely that Motorola, the company responsible for developing the world’s first cell phone, would ever foresee that this same invention would be directly responsible for automobile accidents causing the deaths of nearly 3,000 individuals and the injuries of approximately 425,000 individuals annually in the United States, according to the latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics...Read more »

'Child Care Injury and Death Prevention' by Vanessa Infante

You constantly hear how the children of today are going to be tomorrow's leaders, new inventors, or even the ones to find a cure to a disease, but how can all these children become who they are meant to be when they themselves have endured unspeakable pain. Their dreams fade father into the distance, as their injuries both psychologically and physically advance...Read more »

See the winner of Spring 2016 on this page.