On September 9th San Clemente High School kicked off the new school year with a renewed emphasis on teen driver safety. Approximately 150 junior students received a much-coveted provisional parking pass at the school's lottery drawing but, in order for them to receive a permanent parking sticker they were required to attend the school-sponsored safe driving class featuring our JourneySafe presentation.

Principal George Duarte and PTSA program chairwoman Trudy Podobas, were instrumental in creating this "first of its kind" program involving JourneySafe. It is evident that the SCHS community, once again, is at the forefront of providing teens with the tools they need to keep themselves safe.

Orange County, California has not been spared its share of the edpidemic of teen driving-related death yet many schools seem to pretend this crisis does not exist. In a county with 3 million residents isn't there even more reason to be addressing this problem early and often?

I urge and challenge the administrations of our local high schools, school districts and PTSAs to act boldly and decisively. Bring JourneySafe to your schools, incorporate it constructively into the school culture and use it as a tool to save lives.

How hard can that be?

I look forward to your comments.

David Sabet

I had the honor and pleasure of speaking to over 300 students and parents at University High School in Irvine, California on October 6th. The PTSA headed by Rita Lakhanpal, and Juli Tsang, program chairwoman organized the event and Irvine Unified School District Superintendent Dr. Gwen Gross and Vice Principal Saul Gleser were there to show their support.

Immediately after the presentation University High School decided to include our "Remember the 5" tips in their homecoming dance invitations as a quick way to get the word out to their students. They plan to include the JouneySafe program in their curriculum and to make it a focus for their ASB student government and other student organizations.

We applaud University High School for their support of teen driving safety and urge every High School in Orange County to adopt this type of proactive activity. I welcome your comments.

David Sabet

We are pleased to announce the new, comprehensive JourneySafe DVD that has all our JourneySafe materials, including reproducible flyers and handouts as well as video clips from our segment on E! Network, our PSAs (video ads) and most importantly our powerful JourneySafe Story and JourneySafe Presentation.

If you purchased a JourneySafe manual in the past and would like this new easy-to-use DVD, please contact us with your name and address and we will send you-for no charge-a copy of our new DVD. Finally, one look at our calendar of events for the fall and you can see that we are very busy making presentations at a variety of events.

Although the days get shorter and the air a bit crisper, and the wonder of change is all around it is still difficult for us to embrace the season and its wonders without our Jill and Jonathan. But, we move forward, enjoying time with Jason and hoping that, along the way, our JourneySafe efforts might save teen lives.

Please remember to JourneySafe.

Our heartfelt thanks to all of you who have continued your support of JourneySafe through your financial contributions this year! We trust you realize that your financial support has been a worthy investment in the effort to reduce teen automobile fatalities as you can see from all that is currently happening with JourneySafe. We are looking into ideas for another "official" fundraiser in the near future, however, the overwhelming work of meeting all of our speaking engagements and simply "building" the program left us without the energy or manpower necessary to promote a 2008 walk-a-thon.

Without the constant emotional and financial support of the many individuals and families who continue to believe in and help sustain JourneySafe without regard for publicity or overt recognition, we could never have accomplished all that we have so far. We appreciate you all so much.

We also especially want to thank the friends and family members of Mike and Mary Russell for the contributions made to JourneySafe in loving memory of Marc Russell. Marc lost his life in a motorcycle accident on July 8, 2008. He was a very dear friend of Jill's and we send our deepest sympathies, our love and sincere thanks to his family for designating our foundation as a recipient of contributions "in lieu of flowers." Marc will be forever beloved and remembered by our family and many others here in San Clemente where he grew up.

Two very special young people deserve special recognition at this time for their incredible work on behalf of JourneySafe and teen driver and passenger safety awareness. It means a great deal for us to announce that these two amazing young women are working on our behalf from all the way across the country-in New York and Pennsylvania!

A middle school student from New York, Julia, and her family discovered JourneySafe through our JourneySafe email "Pass it On" campaign. Jill's story and the problem of teen driver and passenger safety truly resonated with Julia, and young as she is, she took it to heart and was determined to do something in her community to help spread the message.

Julia made JourneySafe her "project" of the year. She made display boards, key chains, bumper stickers and other materials promoting JourneySafe that she and her family handed out to many teens, parents, and members of their local community in New York. Julia and her family took it even further by promoting JourneySafe at her older brother's high school.

Out of the kindness of their hearts and inspired by simple compassion and concern for teens like themselves, they covered the costs of all the printing and creating these materials and supplies and then generously donated every penny they collected from selling their materials to the GSMF JourneySafe program.

We would also like to recognize and thank Lindsay Rowley, a student from Misericordia University in Pennsylvania. Lindsay is a talented young musician and songwriter who co-wrote, with a friend, and performed a memorial tribute song for teens killed in car crashes. Lindsay lost a dear friend in a senseless car crash, who was her inspiration.

Her song "Loved Forever" had been on YouTube for some time. Lindsay recently contacted us for permission to update her music video in order to include facts and statistics from the JourneySafe website and specifically our "Remember the Five" tips. Please take a moment to watch Lindsay's music video and encourage her to continue her efforts to "make an impact" as her song suggests.

Thank you to Julia and her family and Lindsay for helping spread the JourneySafe message. We can't begin to tell you how grateful we are for your compassion and for taking a personal interest in our cause. We believe that if more young people like yourselves made a similar personal investment in this cause, we could one day realize our primary goal to reduce the number of automobile related fatalities--the number one cause of teen deaths in America.

Watch Lindsay's music video Loved Forever below or on YouTube

The Sabet family and the JourneySafe program will be included in a special report on prom night dangers: "THS Investigates - Prom Nightmares" on the E! network. The episode premiered in May and re-airs often. Check your local listings for showtimes. Remeber to set Your Tivo or DVR!

A big thank you to all of you who have participated in what's now become our "Pass it On" campaign. In our last newsletter, you may recall, we asked you to watch our JourneySafe presentation video and "pass it on" to your friends and family, especially those with teen drivers. We have received comments from people all over the country thanking us for sharing our story but more importantly asking for more information and ideas on how they can bring JourneySafe to their communities.

If you aren't among the more than 100,000 who have watched our video yet, please take a moment and do so and then be sure to "pass it on" to all the young drivers in your lilfe (and the old drivers too who need reminding to turn off the cell and not drive distracted!)

Many of you have written to us wondering about plans for our next walk-a-thon fundraiser. We are so very appreciative of your support and hope that when the time comes for our next big fundraiser we can depend on you to help out. However, at this time we have had to put a hold on another fund raising event. The day-to-day business of the JourneySafe organization and the presentation of our program is taking up all of our time. We are averaging 8-10 speaking engagements per month and that number is growing as word spreads about our program. On top of that we are continuing to update the website, research and write grants, (for financial help in support of our efforts) and are personally responding to all inquiries for more information about our program. As you can imagine that leaves us little extra time to begin the huge undertaking of a Walk-A-Thon at this time. We are considering a fundraiser for sometime in the coming fall, but we have no definite plans as to what that would look like.

So, instead of orchestrating the huge event a walk-a-thon is, we are humbly asking each of you to consider JourneySafe in your charitable donation giving this year. Your contribution will help us to continue to spread the JourneySafe message and program. We are a fiscally conservative 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in which 98% of all funds received go directly toward advancing the goals of the JourneySafe program and the Gillian Sabet Memorial Foundation. Click here for more info.

As always, we thank you and are grateful for your support of JourneySafe.

Students at San Clemente High School got a little something extra in their winter formal invitations this year. The SCHS Associated Student Body included the JourneySafe "Remember the 5" tips to survive as a safety reminder to their peers attending the dance. The SCHS ASB plans to continue these safety service announcements in their prom invitations and are planning other projects to promote JourneySafe on campus.

"This is an easy way for schools to begin promoting the JourneySafe program," said Ron Pirayoff, ASB Director at SCHS. "I applaud my student leaders who, after viewing the JourneySafe video, felt compelled to begin educating their peers on the ways to keep them safe on the roads."

JourneySafe congratulates SCHS, its ASB and administration for its support and for being the first high school to promote the JourneySafe message in such a creative way and for including a JourneySafe link on the ASB activities section of the school website.

When we first started JourneySafe, I thought we'd have our door busted down by the Insurance, Healthcare and Automobile industries, all anxious to partner with us to spread the JourneySafe program in an effort to save teen lives. Other than generous support from my medical colleagues, local hospitals and local auto dealerships, the Healthcare and Automotive industries have been slow to become involved and I'm at a loss as to the reason why.

It is hard to imagine how this national public health crisis -- 6,000 teens die each year in car crashes -- doesn't seem to be on their corporate philanthropy radar screens.

While I don't believe that these industries are against teen driving safety, it is ever more clear to me that they need a stronger urging from us to step forward and support JourneySafe.

The one shining light in all of this is that AllState Insurance has been our strongest corporate supporter, to date, and has expressed continued willingness to assist us with our goals. For this, we are extremely grateful for without their generous underwriting support, we wouldn't have been able to afford to produce our video and manual, award scholarships to deserving young people, or keep our website up and running.

But, it will take many more corporations to help us save teen lives and this is where you come in.