View full sizeThe Easton Area School District was upended in March 2006 after two teens died in an alcohol-related car crash in Palmer Township.Cut this out. Print it from your computer. Share it with the people you care about.
This is required reading for teens who find themselves cast into situations where they must make choices – choices between doing what they know is right and what they think will preserve their popularity or acceptance.
Last week, six starters from the Easton Area High School football team returned to play after being suspended a game for an undisclosed violation of team rules. Coaches and school officials have said nothing about what prompted the discipline.
I know this much. It involved alcohol and a party. Students posted pictures of it on the Internet.
By all accounts, these are good kids with loving families who made a lousy choice that cost them a week away from their sport and teammates. They are so lucky.
Aside from the punishments they received at home and in school, they suffered the mild embarrassment of having their names associated with the suspensions in media reports in print and online. That's it. Lucky, again.
Each will have ample opportunity to redeem themselves and their reputations by what they do and how they react going forward. They are absolutely entitled to that.
View full sizeMichael CummingsSix years ago, Easton's school district was upended after the tragic deaths of two student-athletes who climbed into a car with a drunken teen not long before he drove into a giant sycamore tree in Palmer Township. The tree is gone now. The trauma, scars and echoes of that terrible morning are not.
There were no second chances for Michael Cummings or Amanda Schultz. They were popular. Good athletes. Great kids with friends and families that idolized them. Cummings, 18, played football and baseball; Schultz, 16, played soccer.
Gone, just like that.
Today's high schoolers were in elementary or middle school when that happened in March 2006. I don't expect them to remember. But now they will know.
Cummings' grandparents wrote a letter to the newspaper, horrified upon learning that in the weeks after the young people's death their friends continued to drink.
“To the parents who are allowing teen drinking in their homes and allowing teens to spend the night to keep them safe: Wake up,” said the letter from Frank and Shirley Bergey. “There is no way that anyone can know that one of them might sneak out and get behind the wheel.
“What saddens us most,” they continued, “is some of these teens are drinking in Michael's memory, thinking they are honoring his memory. Knowing Michael as well as we do, we believe he'd be devastated to know his decisions caused so many heartaches.”
View full sizeAmanda SchultzI hope my children, and yours, too, will relate to that – the pain they will bring upon the people who care most if one of their choices snatches them away. I want to believe that message will ring with them.
In another year or so, I will show my daughter the message that Michael's mother, Vicki Cummings, wrote that spring in The Junto, the high school newspaper. It is unforgettable.
On Friday night, I sat with my 12-year-old as she tapped around Instagram, a social media site like the one that hosted the party pictures. She wore her volleyball uniform from a game that afternoon.
Later, I examined Vicki Cummings' 6-year-old essay to the student body. It still gives me chills.
This is a woman who abided tragedy more than once. Her first child, daughter Lyndsay, was 5 when she died of cancer in 1991. She buried Michael, her first son, 15 years later -- a few months before he was set to lead the Red Rovers as quarterback.
This is the message she delivered to Michael's peers:
"I cannot tell you how many times I spoke to Michael about making smart choices. I repeated those words every time he left the house. I held his face in my hands, and reminded him of all he had to lose if he made poor choices. I begged him never to force me to bury another child.
"And now here I am today forced to speak to you about this horrendously tragic and preventable situation. Which brings us to this. By this age, no matter how many times we as parents have repeated ourselves about the dangers lurking in this world, YOU ultimately make that final choice. YOU decide whether it's worth the risk to get into that car. YOU decide whether it may be worth risking your life to do someone a favor. You kids have got to stop and THINK.
"...Yes, I'm furious with Michael for making poor choices on that evening – and I know if God was not holding him up it would break his heart that he has broken what is left of mine. You kids have got to learn to look further than the moment you're in.
"You will grow up, marry, have a family, and no one will care or even remember that you called your mom to pick you up one night because you were drinking or because you were scared of getting into a car with someone who was. In the big picture of life, so what if your parents yell or if you're grounded. Those actions occur because you are fortunate enough to have parents who love you. And those consequences are temporary and are surely better than being gone from this earth so young."
Straight talk. Tough love.
I think most kids can appreciate that. I just pray they remember it.