Hunter Cleveland Wins Top PSA Prize
Jasper County High School student Hunter Cleveland won a national video contest on the importance of safe driving which landed him and his dad in New York for its filming.
His was one of more than 300 entries in the National Road Safety Foundation’s Drive to Life Public Service Announcement contest as a project in his JCHS film class with Dr. Tyson Harty.
“I found out about this project from my film teacher. He assigned it as, like, an in-class assignment. We’ve done it before, and we’ve had people place for it, but we never had a winner,” Cleveland said.
“This year’s theme was more geared toward passenger empowerment. We’ve spoken to the driver year after year, over and over, and we do see some progress in safe driving, however, we do not address the passenger enough, and the passenger also holds a lot of responsibility in a vehicle,” said Michelle Anderson, the director of operations for the National Road Safety Foundation.
Hunter’s script, called “Break the Silence,” covered that topic. The idea of the film was to have the passengers in three different situations and at the end showing them ripping tape off that have their worries written on it.
Hunter won a $2,000 scholarship and a trip to New York to work with an Emmy-winning production team to put the piece together.
“It’s very important that these messages of safe driving come from teen drivers because car crashes are the No. 1 killer of teens,” she said. “You tend to as a teenager be quicker to listen to a friend than you will to your mother or your dad. So we understand that power.”
Hunter’s PSA will now air on more than 170 television stations nationwide.
“I would say to always be thoughtful of what you’re doing in the car. Don’t take your eyes off the road for anything. And if you come into a situation where you kind of have to try to give that responsibility to someone else in the car to make sure they stay as safe as possible,” he said.
JCHS also had another PSA student winner who brought home a $500 prize.