Billboards Caution Kids About the Cost of Drinking

Take a gander today at the billboard on the corner of Maple Ave. and Route 132.

You’ll see some kids sitting, backs toward you – a couple wearing Montville Indians colors - underneath the line, “Don’t let one game of beer pong” and above “put your dreams of an academic scholarship on the shelf” and “bench your dreams for an Athletic Scholarship.”

You’ll see the same billboard on Route 85, near the intersection with Route 161.

They came about because of Facebook, and the insights of Barbara Lockhart, director of the Youth Services for the town.

On the social media site one day, Lockhart began to see pictures of Montville kids at parties.

Some were drinking. Some were holding beer. Some were just there, at parties where alcohol was clearly being served, and games like beer pong being played. 

Lockhart saw the social media photos in a light that the kids clearly hadn’t.

“Some of these kids had received scholarships,” she says, “and one was at a party, one had a beer in his hand.”

The drinking, the parties, the beer pong come with their own dangers. Their appearance on Facebook, for all the world to see, brings another set of issues.

If schools or teams have no-alcohol policies, a kid could lose his place in school, or his scholarship, because of his actions and his broadcasting of those actions on Facebook.

The billboard project grew from these insights, Lockhart says.

She and Kim Grant, who works with Lockhart at the Youth Service Bureau, put the project together. The kids you see in the billboards (backs only) are kids who were at the Youth Center on the day Lockhart and Grant took the photos.

Lockhart had some funding from a state grant, and asked the SouthEastern Regional Action Council to help. SERAC agreed, and Lockhart contracted CBS Outdoors to put the two billboards up. The cost of the two-billboard project was $1,700 for five weeks. The Youth Service Bureau received a non-profit rate from CBS, Lockhart said.

She and Grant designed the posters on a regular 8.5 by 11 paper, sent them to CBS, and CBS made them enormous and put them up.

The billboards, Lockhart said, are designed for kids. Adults, for instance, might not know that beer pong is a drinking game involving beer and a ping-pong ball – but kids will know right away, Lockhart says.

The timing of the project is perfect, Lockhart says. The billboards will be up through mid-September – just as kids start to go back to school.