Building Safe, Drug-Free Communities Together

About Us · What's New · Newsletter · Links · Contact Us ·

Welcome to the ALERT Partnership’s website. Here you will find useful information about safe teen driving, underage drinking, and substance abuse prevention.

ALERT Partnership is a program in the Community Health Division of the Lehigh Valley Hospital and Health Network in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Since 1987, ALERT has offered numerous resources and technical assistance to Lehigh Valley communities to prevent problems associated with alcohol and other drug abuse. Our History page will give you an idea about some of the things we have done to help strengthen the effectiveness of our local communities to tackle underage drinking and youth gang violence.

The most recent focus of ALERT is to address the number one cause of death for teens -- motor vehicle crashes.

Our goal is to reduce the number of teen car crashes throughout the Lehigh Valley. We hope to achieve this by providing parents with useful tools to help teach their teens to drive, and to monitor their driving once their teens obtain their driver’s license.

We are very pleased to offer our “Road Map to Safe Teen Driving” and our “Parent-Teen Driving Agreement” free of charge. Our updated website provides additional tips for teaching teens how to drive as well as safe driving tips for all drivers. Our links page is filled with a multitude of links to the best online resources for parents and young drivers. We have also developed the “Lehigh Valley Report on Teen Car Crashes”, which presents comprehensive statistics on reportable* crashes in the Lehigh Valley involving young drivers.

“Parenting isn’t Rocket Science. It’s much more difficult than that.”

*reportable crashes are defined as having any of the following conditions:

1. someone is injured or killed, 2. a vehicle needs to be towed, 3. hit and run.

Unfortunately, there is no statistical data available for non-reportable crashes, fender benders, that can still lead to traffic citations, increased insurance rates, and the expense of paying the deductible.