Melinda Cox, Johnson High School PTSA Smart Driving Club

For nearly a decade, Melinda Cox has been on a mission to change what she calls the culture of distracted driving. Cox is the founder of the Johnson High School PTSA Smart Driving Club. Since 2012, she has been teaching students how to advocate for their safety and the safety of others. Like many of us, Cox has heard too many stories about deadly crashes caused by texting and driving. She has been asked to spearhead a districtwide program so that even more people will get a chance to hear the club’s “Eyes on the road, not on your phone” message. “I do not try to scare them, but I try to empower them that they need to be in charge in the car and also in charge of their safety in the form of advocacy when they’re in someone else’s car,” said Cox.

Decades ago, when she was learning to drive in Australia, it was a much different experience than what her daughter had to go through as a teen driver in Texas. Cox was so bothered by all the drivers she saw on their cellphones that she decided to do something about it. She met with local nonprofit groups and a PTA mom from another high school that had already started a safe-driving program. She ended up forming the JHS PTSA Smart Driving Club, and today, members continue to come up with new ways to educate students about the dangers of distracted driving and impaired driving. Honors include being named the 2021 Outstanding Advocate for Children by the Texas PTA.

Currently, the club has 50 members who meet once a month to discuss the group’s goals. Cox’s guidance is key to the JHS PTSA Smart Driving Club’s success; the group also gets a lot of support and funding from the Parent Teacher Student Association (PTSA) and school administrators.

Cox and the students have become community activists, taking their message to other high schools, elementary schools, school district officials, and local and state politicians. Club members worked together to get a cellphone ordinance passed in San Antonio. The City Council passed the ordinance in 2014, which prohibits drivers from holding cellphones while operating a motor vehicle, whether in traffic or stopped at a traffic signal.

“We get our message out in a lot of different ways,” Cox said. “We’ve been to the state capitol or they can do things quietly behind the scenes and come up with a banner or a billboard, or they can stand in front of the District 9 or District 10

representatives and work with them on how to make their driving community safer.”

Johnson High School senior Julia Varghese is the club’s president. She joined the group as a freshman and said the experience has helped her understand what it means to be an active member of the community. Varghese said Cox has been an amazing sponsor. “I think she is to be commended because she has a genuine passion to keep the community safe and to make it a better place which inspires me to also do my best in advocating for safer driving and the community.”

Cox remains laser-focused on how she can draw the public’s attention to this problem. Her goal remains the same, whether she’s attending a TXDOT traffic jam meeting with judges and district attorneys or working with students on a new safedriving bumper sticker. She wants to figure out how to decrease the number of crash fatalities in San Antonio.

“I tell the kids, you’re behind the wheel of a deadly machine, you have to be mature enough and grown-up enough, and then you have to make sure everyone else is too in your family.”

For more information about the JHS PTSA Smart Driving Club’s, go to www.johnsonptsa.com/ smart-driving-club.html

Photos Courtesy of Melinda Cox