BOULDER — Sydney Lamping is a junior at Jefferson High School, and a member of the Family, Career, and Community Leaders of America Club.
She is working to make Montana roads safer, and part of her effort is a new billboard on Interstate 15 near Clancy, which encourages people to buckle their seatbelts.
Sydney talks about her efforts to promote safety:
“It just feels so rewarding knowing that my work is making an impact, and that every person who drives by gets to see that,” Lamping said.
The billboard sits on I-15, positioned so drivers going northbound can see it. According to numbers from the Montana Department of Transportation, an estimated more than 4,000 vehicles travel past on I-15 each day.
While the billboard is really visible, it’s just one part of a two-year-long safe driving project Lamping has worked on through the FCCLA club.
She’s designed bus stop signs, put together public service announcements that have tallied thousands of views on social media, and helped plan a school health and safety fair.
“Her ideas and the work she’s doing for the community are monumental,” FCCLA club supervisor and teacher at Jefferson High School Cassidy Parsons said.
But this is more than a club project for Lamping, save driving and buckling up are important to her personally.
“In October 2024, I lost a close friend in a car accident, and she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt,” Lamping said. “We’d been neighbors since before kindergarten, so that was a pretty big loss in my life. That really was my reason why.”
Lamping’s passion and hard work on this project qualified her for the national FCCLA competition last year, and she placed top 10. And this year, she qualified for the national competition again.
“One of her most incredible attributes is her ability to really reach those judges with her personality, with her heart and with her enthusiasm for what she’s doing,” Parsons said.
Lamping’s work has also caught the eye of MDT. The current billboard is funded through an MDT Vision Zero grant. Next year, she will be working on a committee to try to get the state legislature to pass a bill making not wearing a seatbelt in Montana a primary offense, meaning drivers could get pulled over for it. Currently, it is illegal not to wear a seatbelt in Montana, but it’s not an offense that a driver can get pulled over.
Working toward policy change is a new area for the Jefferson High School FCCLA club.
“Sydney is one of those people that whatever she decides she’s going to do, she’s going to do it with 100-percent integrity and effort, and she’s going to surpass anybody’s expectations,” Parsons said.
Lamping expects it will be a lot of work, but she said she’s looking forward to the challenge.
“Oh yeah, I’m super excited about it,” she said
But before all of that next school year, there is one more big event coming up for Lamping—the FCCLA national competition in Washington, D.C., this summer. Learn more about the Jefferson High School FCCLA club here.
