The Victoria Day weekend marks the beginning of warmer weather, the winding down of the school year and the freedom of early summer.
It is a time for fun but members of Maidstone SADD chapter encourage their schoolmates to make smart decisions on their days off.
Every year they target the week before the long weekend for an anti-drinking and driving awareness campaign. SADD members worked with elementary students to decorate bags with messages for the liquor store and coloured the sidewalks of the downtown area with reminders and drawings.
Friday they held a "white-out" day. Using the statistic that a person is killed due to impaired driving every 30 minutes in North America, they had a student dressed as the grim reaper pull a student out of class every 30 minutes throughout the school day. Once a student was removed from their classroom their face was painted white, they were given a sign with a bio of an actual accident victim to wear and were told they couldn't speak or be spoken to for the rest of the day.
At the end of the day students were called to an assembly and listened as each whited-out student read the bio around their neck. The paragraphs were short but poignant, many written by parents who lost their children to the tragedy of drinking and driving.
As students left the school they were handed a box of Smarties by volunteers with smiles, the message "party harty but be a smartie" and the hope everyone will be back to school safe Tuesday morning.
