Jacobs safe driving club crowned national champs

For four years, the Project Ignition club at Jacobs High School has been among the top 10 programs in the country.

But the "Best of the Best" award, given to the team that has done the most to promote safe driving, has always eluded the Algonquin club.

Late last month, at the National Youth Leadership Council's annual conference in San Jose, Calif., the Algonquin teens finally got the gold.

Jacobs went home with the top prize and was also named the National Leader for Active Engagement of Youth and Community.

The Best of the Best Award was welcome recognition for a team that has worked countless hours to improve seat belt use, curb drunken driving and get students to pay more attention to the road and less to their cell phones.

"We don't ever make first place," said Preksha Maiya, a senior who joined Project Ignition her freshman year. "We were just kind of going for the lifetime achievement award. ... When we got it, I was just like, 'What? What happened?' It's a great end to my senior year. It's the cherry on top of the cake."

The club received $10,000 to spend on outreach efforts and invitations to attend and present at the next two national conferences.

"It's taken four years of hard, hard work by those kids," said head sponsor Eliseo Saldivar. "We weren't expecting to win it."

The seeds of Jacobs' Project Ignition team were planted in 2005, when Saldivar, a physical education and driver's education teacher, mentored a team at Gibson City-Melvin Sibley High School near Urbana.

That year, the Gibson City team won Best of the Best. Saldivar's daughter, Laura, then a student at Westfield Community School in Algonquin, thought her local high school could do the same and started a club at Jacobs.

Since then, Project Ignition at Jacobs has launched safe driving efforts at the local, state, national and global level. Among the most successful:

• With the help of local police, the team has conducted numerous seat-belt monitoring, enforcement and education campaigns. Due in part to students' efforts, seat belt use at the school has climbed from 72 percent four years ago to 96 percent today, according to the club.

• The team lobbied for the passage of new legislation banning the use of cell phones in school zones. A law, sponsored by state Sen. Pam Althoff of Crystal Lake, took effect Jan. 1.

• In 2009, representatives of the team traveled to Qatar at the request of the government there and presented to students about safe driving and service learning. Teens in the small Middle Eastern country continued to correspond with their Jacobs counterparts and later started their own safe driving club.

Despite these achievements, Laura Saldivar was as surprised as her peers when Jacobs won the top prize.

"It was a big shock to us," Laura said. "I helped to start it four years ago, so it was very rewarding to see that we've won."

Algonquin police detective Dennis Walker, who has worked with Project Ignition as Jacobs' police liaison officer, called the award "long overdue" and said seat belt use at Jacobs now compared to five years ago is like "night and day."

"In general, I see the amount of serious injury crashes and personal injury crashes decrease based on seat belt compliance and also technology," Walker said. "I applaud their efforts. It's a great program. The kids are putting so much time into it. Their heart is always in the right place."