June 23, 2004

Newton puts young motorists back in school. Driver’s ed class is first in decade.
by Cory De Vera

Lynn Corcoran wants to have a driver’s license by her 16th birthday in October.

This summer Columbia Public Schools is helping her toward that goal. For the first time in about a decade, the school district is offering a free driver-safety class through Newton Learning. Like many school districts around the state, Columbia eliminated driver’s education classes, in part because of the district’s rising cost of liability insurance.

Assistant Superintendent Skip Deming said the district wouldn’t be offering driver education this summer if not for Newton Learning, which carries its own liability insurance.

Newton’s local director, Roy Moeller, said insurance isn’t only a problem for school districts or his company. Since Newton does not own the teaching cars, it seeks them from local vehicle dealerships, which also need liability insurance.

"I talked to a number of dealers in Columbia, and they said they couldn’t get insurance for it," Moeller said. Eventually, he said, he obtained a teaching car from an auto body shop in Mexico, Mo.

The half-credit class offers about 70 hours of classroom instruction plus several half-hour sessions behind the wheel with teacher Jim Valentik.

Forty-nine students are enrolled in either the morning or afternoon classes that meet daily at Rock Bridge High School.

Valentik said he can take 12 students daily for road lessons. While he’s on the road with those students, a teacher’s aide guides others in classroom lessons.

Though Lynn has received driving lessons from her parents since she passed the state’s written driver’s test last October, she said the summer class has been helpful.

"It’s teaching me how to respond to a lot of different situations you don’t think about," she said.

Lynn’s mother, Becky Awad, said she wanted her daughter in the class even though Lynn was making good progress with lessons at home.

Awad said she had been surprised a few years ago to learn driver’s education is not typically offered in Columbia schools.

"Parents should be able to teach them a little bit, but they also need to sit in a classroom and see the videos about drunk driving. They need to talk with their peers - not just their parents - about different circumstances," Awad said.

Valentik estimates he’s taught 8,000 people to drive over 30 years. He said students come to him with many different levels of experience. Most of the students entered the class having already passed a written driver’s test.

"You can get 10 or 20 kids, and every one of them has a different starting point," he said. "I’ve had some I’ve had to keep on the parking lot for a while just working on the fundamentals."

While Lynn’s family is happy to have access to the class, other families have been disappointed. Some parents say counselors stopped taking applications for the class when word got out that the class was packed.

A week before the summer session was scheduled to start, one of two teachers Newton planned to use backed out, disappointing about 50 students who thought they were in the class.

Darlene Grant, the high school summer principal, said students were admitted to the course on a first-come, first-served basis.

"We realize it was an inconvenience to decrease the number of sections of the driver’s safety course on such short notice. However, we had to do what was fair and in the interest of all students who requested the course," Grant wrote in an e-mail.