My name is Daisey Johnson, and I am so honored to be a part of the 2026 Prepared for Life (PFL) Scholarship class. I feel incredibly blessed to have been awarded this scholarship, but even more blessed to be a small part of the amazing mission of the Lutzie 43 Foundation.
This $4,300 scholarship will help support me during my time at Georgia Southern University by relieving some of the financial burden of college. This scholarship is enough to help cover necessities like meal plans, books, housing, etc. I am so grateful to the Lutzie 43 Foundation, the Lutzenkirchen family, and the entire Lutzie 43 community for making this award possible for me and all of the other deserving recipients.
Two years later, the Lutzie 43 Foundation came back to GMC Prep to host an updated safe driving summit. Although I had remembered the summit from two years before, I had certainly forgotten how impactful the message was. But hearing the message of Philip’s life again and hearing new voices talk about the statistics of distracted and impaired driving once again got to me.
I first learned about Philip Lutzenkirchen’s life and legacy in 2024 during my sophomore year of high school, when the Lutzie 43 Foundation visited my school, GMC Prep, to give a lesson to students about roadway safety. Just a few months before the foundation’s visit, I had gotten my driver’s license. Although I knew that it was important to be safe on the road, I was never really given a lecture on the extent of precaution that needed to be taken. Hearing from Mr. Lutzenkirchen truly changed my perspective on roadway safety. Rather than being mad at the world or God for what happened to Philip, the Lutzenkirchen family was making it their personal mission to make sure it didn’t happen to anyone else. The selflessness in that itself was enough for me to change my perspective on driving and start taking it more seriously.
When I began working on the Safeguarding Your Legacy curriculum, I learned many things that stuck out to me and stuck with me. The most impactful lesson I learned was this: failing to take driving seriously is failing to take your future and your goals seriously. Also, the lesson that driving is about more than you is something that everyone needs to learn and remember. Whenever you drive distracted, it’s not just your life that you are putting at risk; it is also the lives of innocent people. Since I truly realized that, even on days that I may not feel like driving safely for myself, I drive safely for other people.
One other heavy takeaway that I got from both the safe driving summit and the Safeguarding Your Legacy curriculum was the pain that selfish decisions can inflict on other people. Seeing how hurt the Lutzenkirchen family was, along with the rest of the community, broke my heart. I never want my family or my community to be in pain like that, all because I did not want to prioritize safety when driving. Even more so, I never want to be the reason another family hurts like that. I cannot imagine living in this world knowing that my carelessness took another person’s life. That alone is a reason to drive safely, because lives do depend on it.
To be completely transparent, the only reason that I took the Safeguarding Your Legacy Curriculum was because it was a requirement for my scholarship application, but now that I have taken it, I truly believe that it is something that every driver needs to complete. In my opinion, it not only changes your perspective about driving, but also life in general. I strongly encourage anyone who has not yet completed it to begin working on it before the next time you get behind the wheel.
As I conclude, I want to emphasize once more that driving safely is about more than you. It’s also about everyone else in this world! Everyone is someone, and every life has value that should not be ended by careless driving. As mentioned in the most recent safe driving summit at my school, “zero is a realistic number.” It is not unrealistic for people to stop losing their lives in preventable accidents. It is our job, as citizens, humans, and a community, to look out for ourselves and everyone around us by driving safely. No more lives should be claimed from preventable accidents. Remember, zero IS a realistic number. Drive safe!