Reduce impaired driving among youth.

The Prevention First Impaired Driving Prevention Program seeks to reduce impaired driving among youth by increasing awareness, fostering partnerships with school personnel, and providing evidence-based educational resources. The program’s goal is to actively engage school staff, driver education instructors, and community stakeholders to ensure adolescents receive accurate, consistent, and impactful traffic safety education that prevents impaired driving.

The Traffic Safety Program is funded in part or in whole by the Illinois Department of Transportation.

Training Events

Our training events (in person and virtually) are offered throughout the fiscal year. To find the next scheduled event, search below. Training on demand (self-paced) can be found via search or browsing through the online training and recorded webinar descriptions below.

Youth Impaired Driving Training Series

This four-course series equips driver's education teachers, health educators, and prevention advocates with the knowledge and tools to address youth impaired driving in Illinois. Across the series, you'll explore the scope of the problem and its risk factors, the science behind impairment and common myths youth hold, evidence-based strategies for designing effective driver's education lessons, and how to build school-community partnerships that support prevention efforts. Together, these courses provide a thorough foundation for understanding, teaching, and preventing youth impaired driving.

Youth Impaired Driving Course 1: The Scope and Risks

Each year, over one million young people drive after using alcohol or cannabis, but youth impaired driving is not inevitable. It’s preventable. This course gives driver education teachers, health educators, school staff, and prevention advocates the information they need to understand the scope of the problem. During this course, you’ll explore Illinois-specific data on youth alcohol and cannabis use, crash and fatality trends, and key risk factors that make youth particularly vulnerable, such as adolescent brain development, risk perception, and social influence. Estimated completion time is under one hour.

Youth Impaired Driving Course 2: Facts and Misconceptions

"Everyone does it." "I'm fine to drive." These beliefs feel true to young drivers, but they're often wrong, and they can be deadly. This course gives driver education teachers, health educators, school staff, and prevention advocates the tools to spot and correct these myths before they cost a life. During this course, you'll explore how alcohol and cannabis impair the specific skills drivers depend on, examine the most common misconceptions youth hold about driving under the influence, and practice a simple, step-by-step approach for correcting those myths in real conversations. Estimated completion time is under one hour.

Youth Impaired Driving Course 3: Designing Effective Lessons

The driver education classroom is an ideal place to help young drivers think critically about impairment and its consequences. This course introduces nine instructional goals for impaired driving prevention and shows you how to use them as a framework for your curriculum. You’ll explore effective lessons and activities, learn how to work through common barriers, and gain the confidence and tools to add impaired driving prevention to your curriculum or strengthen what you already teach.