Imbler student uses senior project to confront drunk driving dangers

A morning of intercom announcements at Imbler High School turned a routine school day into a warning about how fast drunk driving can shatter a community.

On April 15, 2026, students in Imbler heard a series of somber messages describing the simulated deaths of classmates in drunk-driving crashes, part of Madeline Burright’s senior project. Burright built the presentation around an adaptation of the 15 Minute Program, a campaign tied to the old statistic that someone in the United States died in a drunk-driving crash every 15 minutes. Her goal was to make the danger feel immediate to peers who might otherwise treat it as another distant public-safety message.

The exercise was designed to show how quickly an ordinary school day could be interrupted by a tragedy linked to a preventable choice. That emotional hit mattered because drunk driving warning signs can fade into background noise, especially for teens who hear repeated messages about risk but have not seen the consequences up close. Burright’s project tried to break through that numbness by making the loss feel local, personal and sudden.

The scale of the problem remains large even as the numbers have improved from the worst years. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says about 32 people die each day in drunk-driving crashes in the United States, or roughly one person every 44 minutes. It reported 11,904 alcohol-impaired-driving traffic deaths in 2024, down from 13,384 deaths in crashes involving alcohol-impaired drivers in 2021. The numbers show why prevention still matters in a small community like Imbler, where one bad decision can ripple through a school, a family and the wider Union County area.

Oregon’s response includes an impaired-driving program run by the Oregon Department of Transportation that aims to reduce drunk and drugged driving through education, law enforcement and public outreach. The state’s Impaired Driving Strategic Plan, prepared with the Governor’s Advisory Committee on Driving Under the Influence of Intoxicants, is meant to provide a comprehensive prevention framework. Burright’s school project lined up with that broader effort, but it did so with a local messenger students could recognize.

Imbler School District’s formal senior-project structure made Burright’s effort part of an established school tradition, not a one-off stunt. In a small district, that matters. When a student uses a graduation requirement to deliver a public-safety lesson, the message comes from someone classmates see in the hallway every day, and that can carry farther than another statistic on a poster.