Every 15 Minutes

Every 15 Minutes is a two-day program focusing on high school juniors and seniors, which challenges them to think about driving while drunk, personal safety, and the responsibility of making mature decisions.

Officer Melody Davidson was the first to promote and organize Every 15 Minutes in Chico which was highlighted in a September 1996 LA Times article.

This planning period includes making arrangements with all of the involved agencies, the police, fire department, paramedics, hospital, court, lawyers, judge, jail facilities, coroner/funeral home, students, parents and school administrators.

In recent years, the California Highway Patrol has continued to fine-tune the Every 15 Minutes program, which has always been over two-days - day one being the crash, with day two as the assembly, featuring speakers ranging from the student participants and their parents to motivational speakers, relatives who have lost loved ones in drunk-driving crashes (there are no drunk-driving "accidents"), medical personnel, lawyers and law enforcement officials.

To still maintain the drinking emphasis, it is mentioned that the sober driver could have lessened the severity of injuries or death had they been concentrating on the road and not on the phone.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that in 1995, the first year the program was presented, the rate was actually one death every 30.4 minutes in the United States.