NORWICH – With the Norwich High School Junior Prom now less than a month away, parents, students and staff members at NHS are pulling together to organize the annual After Prom Party to deter students from making potentially fatal decisions on prom night.

The After Prom Party has been an NHS tradition for more than a decade, originally founded to encourage students to refrain from drinking and driving. Kelly Collins-Colosi, junior class advisor and social worker for the Norwich City School District, said most fatal and near-fatal car accidents nationwide occur in the spring season, namely the nights of prom and high school graduation. Events like the After Prom Party, she said, “encourages students to make smart choices.”

“The fear and the reality is that there is always something devastating that happens this time of year,” Collins-Colosi said. “Every two minutes, someone is injured by a drunk driver and every 30 minutes, someone is killed.”

According to the latest statistics released by Students Against Destructive Decisions (SADD) - a national organization that educates about the consequences of underage drinking, drug use, and impaired driving - 72 percent of today’s teenagers will have consumed alcohol by the end of their high school career; and 26.4 percent of underage persons (ages 12-20) have used alcohol within the last 30 days. SADD also notes that – in 2008 – 11,773 people were killed in alcohol-impaired driving crashes, accounting for nearly one-third (32 percent) of all traffic-related deaths in the U.S.