JEFFERSON TWP — On average, a person charged with driving under the influence has driven impaired more than 350 times before being caught.

That's what Clay Martin with the Save a Life Tour told Knoch High School students during an assembly Tuesday morning, warning them on the dangers of driving drunk or distracted.

“All things start as an easy habit,” Martin said.

Both texting while driving or driving under the influence can start as something people tell themselves is only a “one-time deal.” But then it can become a habit.

“How long will that habit be with you?” Martin asked the students.

If someone answers a text once at a stop light, how often does that conversation continue? How often does that open the door for drivers to feel overconfident, like they can get away with it consistently?

These questions were posed by Martin during the Save a Life Tour's presentation in advance of the high school prom Friday.

The Save a Life Tour is put on by Kramer Entertainment of Grand Rapids, Mich. It was created in 2003 to educate young people on the danger involved with drinking and driving.

The tour uses simulators to give the students a different perspective on what it's like to drink and drive or text while driving. Both of those simulators were at Knoch for students to try.

On the drunken driving simulator, the students drive a dismantled car with a computer program that adds in a delay when students use the gas or brake or turn the wheel.

The simulation gets progressively more difficult, but the delay's maximum just under a second, Martin said.

But that second makes all of the difference.

Senior John Schnur was the first to try the drunken driving simulator, which he said was harder than he had expected.

“It was kind of OK at first, but the delay is what made things a lot more realistic,” he said.

Unlike Schnur, senior Brennan McTighe did not end up crashing — much to his own surprise.

“It was really hard to compensate for (the delay),” McTighe said.

While he didn't crash, he did say that he swerved plenty and had trouble preventing a crash while driving with the simulation's delay.

On the second simulation, students had a cell phone plugged into the simulator, ringing every few seconds with a specific question that students needed to text a response to.

Questions in the program would ask students to tell their friends if they wanted to go see a football game or tell them about their weekend, but students often opted for one-word responses during the simulation.

In fact, there's quite a few spelling errors Martin sees with the students' texts.

“Both the texting and the driving are not doing as well as they could,” he said.

Senior Zach Nguyen was surprised how difficult it could be to focus on driving while texting, something he said he tries not to do.

“I hardly ever text and drive so it's probably going to be hard to focus,” he said, before attempting the simulation.

Nguyen said he has been characterized as a fairly cautious driver by friends and his former driving instructor.

However, Nguyen was surprised at how difficult it was to focus even if he held up the phone near the road so he was not looking away.

Nguyen successfully made it to the end of the simulation after about two minutes of driving and texting.

“I didn't crash, but I came close twice,” he said.

Martin stresses to students that there is no “winning” when you drive drunk or distracted.

“Some students say if they didn't crash then they won,” Martin said. “But I'm here to say that you don't ever win if you're driving distracted.”

For Martin, the best response to the program is when teachers stop by the simulations and say that students have been talking about the program in the classroom. Martin sees that as his lesson spreading beyond the assembly, and he likes to hear when students are sharing what they learned through the simulations.

The Save a Life Tour also uses displayed videos, including family testimonies involving drunken driving or distracted driving.

The event was sponsored by the Knoch Knights Legacies Foundation, the Conlon Tarker law firm, the Glenn and Annette Miller-Clark Family Trust and Miller-Phillips Insurance, according to Jenny Webb, the district's communications liaison.