Har-Ber Students Win Grant

— Har-Ber High School has been chosen as one of 25 high schools from across the U.S. and Canada to receive a $2,000 grant through Project Ignition, a service-learning teen driver safety program.

Project Ignition, sponsored by State Farm and coordinated by the National Youth Leadership Council, encourages students to create awareness and engagement campaigns to address teen driver safety issues.

Each year, teams of high school students submit proposals about safety projects they’d like to do, said Gary Stephenson, a State Farm spokesman. The top 25 proposals are awarded with grants.

Their projects will be judged this spring, and the top 10 will receive additional $2,500 grants to further their projects this fall. Those winners also will be eligible to send a team to the National Service Learning Conference in March 2014.

“Auto crashes are the leading killer of kids,” Stephenson said. “So it’s getting youth involved in their own safety and promoting this among their peers.”

The Har-Ber project is the work of four students in Debra Lamb’s Environmental and Spatial Technology class: seniors Daniel George and Camille Burchfield and sophomores Wil Church and Wade Doss. They are putting together a documentary to make the community aware of the dangers of distracted driving.

“We really want to focus on the problem and the solution,” George said.

Part of Har-Ber’s grant money will go toward a custom-built computer to make the editing process more efficient, George said.

A school assembly at Har-Ber is scheduled for Friday morning to officially present the Project Ignition grant.

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