From Classroom to Funeral — The Two Days Simi Students Will Never Forget
Daniel Jordan 
Every 15 Minutes Returns to Simi Valley High School
(CLAIR | Simi Valley, CA) — Last week, a car crash stopped traffic on Stow Street. Wrecked vehicles. Emergency crews working fast. A drunk driver in handcuffs. Bodies on the pavement.
None of it was real. All of it was meant to be.
On March 11 and 12, Simi Valley High School hosted “Every 15 Minutes” — a two-day drunk driving prevention program that has shaped how local teenagers think about getting behind the wheel for more than two decades. The California Highway Patrol program is coordinated each year by the SVHS PTSA and supported by more than 30 businesses and organizations across Simi Valley. It rotates annually between Simi Valley High School and Royal High School, so every student at both campuses experiences it before they graduate.
The name comes from where the program started. When Every 15 Minutes was founded in 1990, a person died in a drunk driving crash in the United States every 15 minutes. That number has improved since then. The program has not stopped.
Day 1 is the crash. Student actors take on roles — the drunk driver, the injured, the ones who don’t make it — while actual police officers, firefighters, and paramedics from the Simi Valley Police Department, Ventura County Fire Department, and American Medical Response work the scene with real urgency. There is no soft version of it. A Simi Valley Police officer makes an arrest. Reardon Funeral Home is on site. Swinks Towing brings the vehicles. The Simi Institute of Cosmetology puts the makeup on the student actors — injuries, blood, the works. A video production company captures everything, because the students who are watching from the sidelines will see it again the next morning.
After the crash, the student participants don’t go back to class. They move through what happens next — the emergency room, the morgue, the police station, the courthouse. Then they are taken to the Best Western Posada Royale Hotel and that is where things get quiet in a different way. No phones. No social media. No texting friends or calling family. For the rest of the night, they are completely cut off from the world outside that hotel. And in that silence, each student sits down and writes a goodbye letter — to their mom, their dad, a brother or sister, a best friend — as if the crash had been real and they were not coming back.
While that is happening, their families are getting a knock on the door. Officers and chaplains drive to family homes that afternoon to deliver the news that their son or daughter was killed. Every family knows it is part of the program. It does not matter. You still feel it.
Day 2 starts with a funeral. A bagpiper leads the student participants into the school gymnasium while the full junior and senior class watches in silence. Then, one by one, the students stand and read the letters they wrote the night before. The gym does not make a sound.
After the letters, the room watches the video — everything from Day 1, start to finish, from the story that led to the crash all the way through the hospital, the morgue, the jail, and the courtroom. A guest speaker follows, someone who has lived through a drunk driving event and carries it still. When it is over, nobody leaves the same way they walked in.
The program is scheduled in spring on purpose. Prom is coming. Graduation is coming. The season that brings the most celebration also brings the most risk, and the PTSA and its partners want students walking into that stretch with something real already sitting with them.
None of this happens without an enormous amount of people pulling in the same direction. More than 30 businesses and organizations sponsored or participated in this year’s event.
Event sponsors include:
- Simi Valley High School PTSA
- California Highway Patrol
- Simi Valley Police Department
- American Medical Response
- Rancho Simi Recreation & Parks District
- Reardon Funeral Home
- Swinks Towing
- Stoke Light Video Production & Lighting
- Simi Valley Unified School District
- Rotary Club of Simi Sunset
- Grandstand, LLC
- Simi Institute of Cosmetology
- Chick-fil-A
- Ryan Mills, Realtor with Mills Group at Real
- Jack Daly
- Simi Valley Rotary
- Simi Valley Police Foundation
- Simi Valley Police Officers Association
- Ventura County Fire Department
- Adventist Health Simi Valley
- Ventura Superior Court
- Posada Royale Hotel
- Kiwanis of Simi Valley
- City of Simi Valley
- Chi Chi’s Pizza
- Trader Joe’s
- Simi Valley Education Foundation
- BVI Apparel USA
- Rotary Club of Simi Sunrise
- The Elks Lodge #2492
- City Printing & Graphics
A former student who went through the program a few years ago said, “As long as it saves somebody, it’s doing its job. It changed my perspective on so much.”
That is the whole point. The crash gets cleaned up. The makeup comes off. The students go home. But what they carried out of that gym on March 12 — the letters, the silence, the bagpiper, the knock on the door their parents answered — that does not wash off so easily.
Prom is weeks away. Graduation follows. And for the juniors and seniors of Simi Valley High School, both arrive this year with something extra — the memory of two days they will not forget.
