South students not immune to teenage driving trends:

For students who receive violations, consequences arise

Avery Jerva and Lorelei Streb

A stale green light hung over the intersection of Waukegan and Lake while John Skorupa, South Driver’s Education Teachers instructed a driving lesson with a South student at the wheel. According to Skorupa, the light turned yellow when the student was approaching the turn. A slamming of the gas pedal brought the car through the intersection as the light turned red. A close call, Skorupa says, who has witnessed the driving habits of many South students.

According to Skorupa high school students belong to an age group that is more prone to getting driving violations. According to a non-scientific Oracle conducted survey 29 students out of 148 have received driving violations, excluding students who have not yet received their license.

“Some driving violations that kids make would be going through stop signs, speeding, not yielding the right of way, [or] having too many passengers in their car before they’re actually allowed to,” Skorupa said.

Depending on the violation, there are certain consequences that must take place; it depends on how the police officer wants to write the ticket, and partially on what village or city that the ticket is written in, according to Skorupa. Teenagers see a significant number of violations for a variety of reasons.

“They may appear to be cocky or arrogant in their driving skills, thinking they’re exceptionally good when they’re just learning how to drive,” Skorupa said. “So the lack of experience hurts them.”

According to Ronald Bean, assistant principal in charge of the Dean’s Office, if there is a car accident that occurs close to GBS in the morning he will go to see if anyone involved is a student who attends GBS.

“I’ll always go out there just to check and make sure it’s not kids from Glenbrook South,” Bean said. “If it is we always make sure that we help them contact their parents and wait with them until their parents get there. I always say to parents that we will excuse them for the day if they don’t feel up to being in class.”

According to Bean, most of the time when students receive tickets or violations off campus the school will not be notified. It is only when the student has to miss school to appear in court does the school find out and excuse the student for that day, but when the offense happens on campus then the school becomes involved.

“What we would do if it was a student that had a parking pass, and they had multiple driving violations on campus, we could revoke that pass,” Bean said. “We could take the pass away and not allow them to drive or park on campus.”

According to Bean, after the first offense the student who committed the violation will be given a warning and a school-issued ticket, after the second time they will be given a few detentions and after that the student must attend a six hour Saturday detention.

“Knock on wood, we haven’t had a situation where we’ve had to revoke someone’s parking privileges because of their behavior on campus with their cars,” Bean said.