February 3 was the third “TextLess Live More” day on campus, when the majority of students shut off their cellphones for the day. Students wear blue bracelets to show their commitment to the campaign. Three students—Emmie Atwood ’14, Kaitlin Gately ’14 and Abby Lebovitz ’14—founded the TextLess Live More nonprofit to honor Merritt Levitan ’13, who was killed when struck by a car during a group cross-country bike trip last summer.
“Often, we live not in the real world but in the virtual one, checking our Facebook pages, our email, our Twitter accounts,” says Emmie. “Merritt, however, lived in the most real way possible. She was always completely attached to what was happening right in front of her. She embodied life in its truest form. Although the TextLess campaign is designed to prevent texting and driving, we want our movement to be bigger than that: Our goal is to decrease excessive phone use and encourage people to focus on the interactions taking place right in front of them. In this way, we want to honor Merritt’s authentic and present way of living.”
One of the group’s goals was to spread the campaign to other schools. “TextLess Live More” is now active throughout high schools in half a dozen other states, as well as in colleges including Hamilton, Colgate, Harvard, Brandeis, Stonehill
and Lesley.
In morning assemblies at Milton, students have held a moment of reflection to remember Merritt; watched the film From One Second to the Next, a documentary by Werner Herzog showing the dangers of texting and driving; and listened to Merritt’s father, Richard Levitan, talk about his daughter and the importance of the campaign. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in 2011, 3,331 people were killed in crashes involving a distracted driver. Of drivers 15 to 19 years old involved in fatal crashes, 21 percent of the distracted drivers were distracted by the use of cellphones.