An interview with Rebecca from Kaikorai Valley College
Recently, Mark had the privilege of interviewing Rebecca from Kaikorai Valley College’s SADD/Kaitiaki o Ara group in Dunedin. They chatted about all things SADD and her group’s recent participation in Road Safety Week. You can read the transcript of the interview here or watch it at the bottom of the page.
Hi Rebecca! Tell us a little bit about yourself, what school you go to, how long you have been involved with SADD, how many people in your group etc.
My name is Rebecca Barnard and I go to Kaikorai Valley College. I have been involved with SADD since last year, since year 12. We have 20 - 22 people in our group.
Is there anything personal that you’d like to share?
I have a pet rabbit. I like reading. My rabbit is named Princess because she likes to always stomp her feet.
Tell us about your experience with SADD and what it means to you.
I just started to drive on my restricted a couple of months ago and I started to notice how easy it is to become distracted, and have seen others easily become distracted. When I first joined SADD last year I just thought it would be a fun way to see what I could do to help the community, and I didn’t think I would have a big impact. So this year when I became the SADD leader I realised I needed to make things a bit more serious. To me, SADD means helping the community more, to help them realise how important it is and how often crashes etc happen - they basically happen every day.
How can SADD help young people and their communities?
Helping combat bad habits, not a lot of people have drivers that help them drive when they are on their learners, and they could even be learning bad habits from their parents. Even if you only have two people in your SADD group and you raise your voice to say “hey, this isn’t right, this is what should be happening!”
Why did you join SADD?
My friend was joining and was like “hey, I’m joining SADD - would you like to join?” And I was like “sure, why not?” When I first joined SADD I was like “there is more meaning to this” but I really joined because my friend joined.
Tell us a bit about what your group did for road safety week.
One day we wrote messages in chalk on the concrete at school, some facts about SADD and road safety. We also did the sticky note activity - What would you miss? Quite a lot of people did it, I was really surprised! We also filmed a couple of videos with our seniors so they could say what SADD means to them and what they have been doing. Then we did a colouring competition with the juniors.
To me it's good to target every age, just because their parents are driving and if they know something they should tell their parents. In the colouring competition there were quite a few facts about driving and I got a few prizes for them so they were pretty happy about that!
We also had a discussion about parents parking in front of the school for quite a long time, and thought that maybe we should have a five minute drop off zone to keep things moving. We noticed that because the parents stop there, more traffic piles up because people want to pick their kids up from school and drop them off. It makes the area really busy, people get road rage and they don’t want to stop for the buses etc. So, we’re trying to create a five minute drop off zone to make that whole situation better.
Have you spoken to the school staff about this issue?
They think it’s a good idea and we are going to be talking to the council about it to see if we can go ahead with that idea.
Did you get any feedback/comments/questions from anyone about your road safety week activities?
We had quite a few students that would stop and look at the messages with the chalk and they were like “oh really, I didn’t know that!”. And occasionally when I would walk past someone they would be like “hey, you’re the SADD leader aren’t you?” and I would be like “yeah, that’s me, what's up?”. They would ask me for road safety facts and get me to tell them more information. I think, especially the juniors - they were quite interested in it. They were like “we found that really cool” and “you should do another colouring competition!”.
For road safety week we also did Kahoots. We found some on the SADD website and just for the fun of it we created our own as well.
What age groups do you think benefit from SADD?
Anyone junior class and up because they pay more attention to their parents when they drive. Especially seniors, they are just getting their learners and their restricted licences. Teenagers and young adults are the main audience.
What’s the most fun you’ve had while you’ve been with SADD?
I want to say the term 1 workshop and the fun snacks we got. I also want to say, our SADD leader from last year, me and another year 12 went to the April Conference (in 2021) where we stayed over at a school. We had a couple of days of doing activities - it was really fun interacting with other schools and seeing what they were doing for SADD and getting advice from them. I found that really fun.
If someone was brand new to SADD, what would your advice to them be?
If you take part in SADD and listen to all of those facts/all the information we get, and you hear how many accidents or distracted drivers there could be you’ll be shocked. Someone who isn’t in SADD might be like “there can’t be that many accidents”
See what you can do, any small detail that you can change, or a big thing you can change and talk to others who might have the same opinion. Get more people to raise it (the issues/message) like what we are doing with the five minute drop off zone. At first it was just a problem and we didn’t know if we could change it, we talked to more people about it and just like that we’re going to go to the council about it.
If you’re just starting SADD, pay more attention to the roads to see what you can change and raise your voice about it.
Is there anything else you would like to share?
People should drive safe, not drink and drive and not be distracted. Stick to the road rules guys!
Thank you so much for your time, Rebecca!