Senior Noah Ismael received a Frederick County Student Peace Award on April 16 at the Friends Meeting School in Ijamsville.  He received a $100 check and a second check for $100 was donated to a charity of his choice, in this case Relay for Life.  Sponsored by many organizations in Frederick County, the award committee seeks to recognize students who have demonstrated community service and the drive to make change for the better.

Ismael has been involved in many projects throughout his high school career, but the award committee recognized him for the project he completed his junior year, Every 15 Minutes. He took a concept for an educational program on distracted driving from idea, through planning, to actualization. “Every 15 Minutes” is project that teaches about the impact on a school community of a drunken driving crash with fatalities.With the sponsorship of the Student Government Association, Ismael set out to bring it to Linganore.

 He recruited students, staff, and community members to serve on a planning committee that met twice a month. He led the meetings, from developing the agenda to providing minutes with assigned follow-up tasks. The event took place in April 2015 over a two-day period.

It involved staging a crash scene involving four students in two cars, with emergency response. County sheriff deputies did field sobriety checks and arrested one student for impaired driving. During the rest of the day, one student was removed from the school population every 15 minutes to represent the loss of life due to distracted and/or impaired driving. These students were sequestered until the end of the school day when they were taken to a retreat center for an overnight event of reflection and team building.

When the sequestered students returned to school the next morning, there was an assembly where the Juniors and Seniors were shown a video of the events following the crash. The video included the notification of one fatality’s parent, the trial of the impaired driver, and the sentencing of the driver. Noah had arranged for the taping of these events with the New Market Volunteer Fire Department and the Frederick County Courthouse. Maryland District Court Judge Janice Ambrose presided over the court proceeding for the video and the guest speaker at the second assembly was the victim of a drunk driver as a teenager.

Deborah Haines, a member of the selection committee, said, “This was the most impact event to raise awareness of impaired driving that I have witnessed in my 15 years in education.”