SOURCE:  Los Angeles Times

Texting and Driving, experts suggest can be deadly as driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

“Border collie jill surveying the view from atop the sand dune.” Those were the last words of Malibu plastic surgeon Frank Ryan, best known for “reconstructing” reality TV star Heidi Montag. It’s not quite up there with “Et tu, Brute?” Yet it seemed important enough for him to text it just before driving off a cliff in August. Jill survived.

We don’t know what the message was in a 2007 accident involving the sender and her four fellow New York high school cheerleaders. But it probably wasn’t worth slamming head-on into a truck, killing them all. And the 2008 Chatsworth train collision, in which 25 people died and more than 100 were injured, was officially attributed to the engineer of the Metrolink commuter train being distracted by text messaging.

Unfortunately, laws intended to deal with the problem of texting while driving, a major topic at the Transportation Department’s Distracted Driving Summit on Sept. 21, reflect vital misunderstandings about why a cellphone combined with a moving vehicle can be so deadly and how to deal with it.

Texting while driving can be more dangerous than driving while swigging Jack Daniels, according to studies. In a 2009 survey, Car and Driver magazine tested two of its staffers under a variety of conditions. It found that on average, driving at 70 mph, one man braking suddenly while legally drunk (0.08 blood alcohol content) traveled 4 feet beyond his baseline performance. But reading an e-mail while driving sober, he traveled 36 feet beyond the baseline result and 70 feet while sending a text. In the worst case while texting, he traveled 319 feet before stopping.

Yet 66% of respondents to a 2007 Harris Interactive poll admitted they’ve texted while driving, even as 89% said it should be banned. And it’s the youngest drivers, who already are in far more than their share of road accidents and deaths, who do it most, according to government and insurance industry reports.

There are no reliable studies regarding deaths associated with driving and texting. But consider that in 2002, when texting was still a novelty, cellphone usage killed an estimated 2,600 Americans, according to a study by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. Yet texting and driving is 17 times more dangerous than just talking on a phone, according to a 2009 Virginia Tech study. And we sent about 15 times the number of messages in 2009 as we did in 2005, according to one wireless industry report.

One possible explanation for why we can’t seem to keep our paws off those tiny keyboards is that surveys show that a vast majority of American drivers believe themselves to be above average — and not just in Lake Wobegon. Hence the belief that we need to ban thee but not me.

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Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s idea of putting cigarette-pack type warning labels on cellphones is as worthless as it sounds. We don’t need text education. We need legal coercion. Yet 20 states still don’t ban texting and driving, and only eight plus the District of Colombia ban talking on hand-held phones while driving. None ban hands-free phones.

However, the mere existence of laws alone is not enough. Almost twice as many Californians in a new Automobile Club of Southern California survey say they now use cellphones while driving than admitted to doing so before it became illegal 20 months ago. And texting laws in four states surveyed have done nothing to reduce reported collisions, according to figures released by an affiliate of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

Why? Penalties are a joke and enforcement is essentially nonexistent. A first offense is merely a $20 fine in California, and $50 for subsequent violations. By contrast, a first DUI conviction in the state carries a jail sentence of four days to six months, a fine as high as $1,000, a six-month license suspension and more.

Enforcement efforts are virtually nonexistent because everyone thinks it’s so difficult. Yet equipment that detects outgoing radiofrequency signals is neither new nor cost-prohibitive and no more invasive than traffic control cameras, radar or radar detector spotters. But even such low-tech “equipment” as human eyeballs can work. Results from two pilot programs released Tuesday by the Department of Transportation show that. During a yearlong test, using a combination of public service announcements and programs in which officers were specifically watching out for drivers using cellphones, hand-held cellphone use while driving dropped 56% in Hartford, Conn., and 38% in Syracuse, N.Y.; texting while driving declined 68% and 42%, respectively.

“The laws are simple to enforce,” says Jennifer Smith, president of Focus Driven, patterned after the highly effective Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

Yet none of this will have any effect if we don’t recognize that the specific cause of the distraction “isn’t your hands or eyes but your head,” as University of Illinois cognitive scientist Daniel Simons puts it. “Texting requires you to take your mind off the road.” Indeed, hands-free phones may induce a fatally false sense of complacency “if you falsely believe that you will notice what’s on the road while focusing attention on your phone or a keyboard,” Simons adds. That’s why studies repeatedly show hands-free phones to be just as dangerous as hand-helds.

But current state laws universally allow hands-free phones, except in a few places for certain categories such as teens and bus drivers. And yes, there are voice-to-text apps that allow verbal text messaging, which some promote as a safer alternative.

For now, all you can do is control your own conduct, including downloading software that automatically blocks outgoing messages while turning off alerts for incoming ones. No message is worth dying for.

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MY TAKE: Make no mistake, kids are texting on every phone made from T-Mobile PDA phones to cheap  no contract cell phones, not only while driving, but walking into stores, movie theaters, malls, on campus and everywhere else.  They are not even looking up to see the sky above them anymore or notice life going on around them.  Even as families sit down to enjoy a meal together at a restaurant, they are texting!

If I still ran my personal injury lawfirm I would be raking up the big bucks on these text while driving cases. I know one wrongful death lawyer who is amidst a case involving a mother of four who was texting while driving.  She hit a man in a crosswalk and killed him.  She has ruined her life all for the sake of a message.  What happened to the plan to put texting ed. classes in all CDL driving school courses, from the best academy driving school in New York has to offer to the private classes in California?  And what about putting some teeth into the laws?

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A Lutheran school lost its facility, but has reopened as a secular school after the parents raised thousands of dollars were to happen.  The New Chapter Academy has a new beginning as does Principal Ginger Joseph.  The Lutheran school came back from the brink last month when it was slated to close the parents would have nothing of it.

The Holy Trinity Community Lutheran School, which lost its Hollis facility earlier this year, reopened as the New Chapter Academy in September. It is now housed in the former St. Albans Police Athletic League building.

The school was expected to close after it lost support from the Metropolitan New York Synod, which had overseen the pre-K-through-8 program and provided a building for the school. But in a move that could be a model for other religious schools struggling with dwindling enrollment, parents raised thousands of dollars and reopened the school as a secular private school.

“What we asked the parents to do is believe in us and believe that this thing could happen,” said Darnel Lyles, chairman of the academy’s board of trustees.

“The school is one big family, from the parents to the teachers to the administration,” said Lyles, who is also the father of two academy students. “We all want to do what’s best for our children.”

Parents had looked into turning Holy Trinity into a charter school, he said, but decided it was easier to create a nondenominational academy instead. They found a new space for the school with the help of local elected officials.

It was allowed to retain its academic credentials, he said, by changing its name and forming a nonprofit board of trustees.

“We worked as hard as we did to keep the school open for our children,” Lyles said. “The alternative public schools available to us were not appealing.”

The synod decided to close the school because it couldn’t afford to help Holy Trinity stay open any longer, said the Rev. Gary Mills, synod spokesman.  The synod was lending the school money to meet its operational expenses each month, he explained, and the school was more than $1 million in debt. Enrollment was also down, which meant fewer tuition dollars.

The school once called the Holy Trinity Community Lutheran School, had signs out urging parents to sign up their children for the following year.  However, many did not think that there would be a next year at the Hollis Institution.

Officials at the Metropolitan New York Synod, which oversees the pre-K through eighth-grade school, said Holy Trinity is being closed because the synod can no longer bankroll it. St. Stephen’s Lutheran School in Brooklyn is also scheduled to close.

Parents and teachers fought to keep it open for one more year – just long enough to be eligible for charter school status.

“It’s ludicrous for this place to close,” said Marie Evans, 49, of Hollis, who has a daughter in the eighth grade. “Children do well here.”

“It’s too bad, but it’s a challenge when you have so many schools that are facing the same problem,” said David Olson, interim assistant to Bishop Robert Rimbo at the synod. “There’s a limit to the resources.”

Over the last few years, enrollment at Holy Trinity has dropped to a low of 120 students, from the past average of 150-160. And even with an increase in tuition, the school has still needed hundreds of thousands of dollars from the synod to remain open.

“We have regretted that we cannot continue to provide,” Olson said. “But we are hopeful that these students will find as good of an education in a nearby school.”

Parents and staff did not taking the decision lightly. They met with city Department of Education officials and local leaders about turning Holy Trinity into a charter school. They have also been fund-raising.

“This is an important school for the Hollis area,” said City Councilman Leroy Comrie (D-Hollis) at a meeting with parents last week. “We need to do everything we can to pressure the synod to keep it open.”

School officials now claim they can afford to keep the school open another year without financial assistance from the synod – as long as enrollment goes up.   But to the dismay of parents like Fiamma Rieckman, 33, of Hollis, that did not seem likely. She attended the school as a child, and now her 9-year-old son is enrolled there.

“We wish them all the best,” Mills said of the school’s new independent endeavor. “We’re happy that they could reopen and continue.”  The synod did close St. Stephen’s Lutheran School in Brooklyn.

Ginger Joseph, New Chapter’s acting principal and middle school teacher, said she is happy her school was able to survive.  “I truly believe the synod did us a favor,” she said. “We ended up with a facility that is twice the size we had before.”

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My Take: I think parents should get involved in their kid’s school.  I think they should get more involved with their kids as well.  One time in the year you see parents paying attention to their kids most is a holiday season.  That usually starts with Halloween.

While the parents look for sexy costumes, the kids try to convince them they want to be there favorite superhero or rock star.  Eventually, the parents help them pick out their Halloween costume and all our happy, most of the time.  Of course, most parents are most attentive at the beginning of their child’s life.  They send out baby announcements galore, to everyone that they can think of.  Some even send out personalized birth announcements to close friends and family.

However, because of the demands online in our society today many parents stop paying attention.  At least, until their child gets into bad trouble and that trouble usually involves the police.

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