Return to Virginia Business - May 2001

Virginia Weekend
Teaching teens to drive
A few hints from an anti-terrorist school might help

by Paula C. Squires

The engine of the 2000 Pontiac Grand Prix rumbles as the driver shoots away from the starting line. "Keep the speed at 35 miles per hour," commands the driving instructor. I sit in the back seat wondering if my nerves will survive this.

Our managing editor, Paula Squires, gets ready to knock down a couple of cones. Photo by Wayne Scarberry

I’m the passenger of Justin Lawson, a senior from West Point High School, who has volunteered to take a new class, advanced driver’s education and crash avoidance.

The first drill — straight-line braking — isn’t so bad. Justin jerks the car to a stop just inches in front of a traffic barrier. Next up: a slalom course of bright orange traffic cones where Justin concentrates on steering. He whips through, not hitting a single cone. But the next drill is something else. As Justin cruises along at 30 miles per hour, instructor Don Woolridge places a large piece of cardboard over Justin’s side of the windshield. I clutch the hand grip and question Woolridge’s sanity. Thankfully, he helps steer the car as Justin heads straight towards a plastic pole.

Suddenly, Woolridge removes the cardboard and screams, "Now!" My heart flips as Justin slams on the brakes, throwing the car into a skid and wiping out the pole. After I resume breathing, Woolridge explains coolly that the exercise tests a driver’s ability to respond, with split-second timing, to an emergency. Justin seems unruffled. "It’s better to have these experiences here in a controlled situation rather than run across them for the first time on the road," he says.

So, what I am doing here? As the mother of two teen-age drivers, I cringe every time I hear the grim statistics—automobile crashes kill more teenagers than any other single cause. The driver’s training course offered by International Training Inc. in West Point is designed to reduce fatalities by preparing inexperienced teen-age drivers for real-life driving emergencies. Last year in Virginia, 157 young drivers died, a 39 percent increase from the previous year. Several high-profile wrecks that resulted in multiple deaths galvanized this year’s General Assembly to pass tougher driving laws for teens.

Still, there’s plenty of room for improvement, particularly on the training side. State-approved driver’s education requires classroom instruction and only 14 sessions in a car, half of which are observational. ITI’s day-long course has students spending 80 percent of the time behind the wheel. They receive instruction in off-road recovery — a critically important lesson since many teens die when they fail to recover after running off the road.

Too bad the ITI course can’t be for everyone. It costs $295, but ITI is recruiting corporate sponsors including automobile manufacturers like General Motors and Pontiac so that scholarships will be available to teens whose families can’t afford the fee. "We want ethnic, income and gender diversity. We don’t want this to be an elite program," says ITI President Jerry Hoffman.

Hoffman’s operation has a definite cloak-and-dagger aura. He’s a retired investigator for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, and his training facility northwest of Williamsburg looks like something out of a spy novel. The company’s headquarters office sits at the end of an obscure gravel road. An American flag flies over the plain, modular buildings, which house ITI’s classrooms. Nearby is a 3,700-foot runway, a parachute zone, an 8,000-square-foot firearms training center and the driving range.

It’s no surprise that the bulk of ITI clients include high-ranking military officers, corporate executives and U.S. and foreign diplomats who trek to West Point to take courses in things like surveillance detection and anti-terrorist evasive-driving. We’re talking J-turns and high-speed chases, exercises that, thankfully, were left out of the teen-age course. ITI, a fast-growing company that earned $6.2 million in revenues last year, is owned by O’Gara-Hess & Eisenhardt, an Ohio-based maker of armored vehicles. The fact that it’s gotten into the teen drivers’ training business should be of interest to business executives with teen-age children.

Considering the allure of danger and intrigue at ITI, it might seem strange that Hoffman considers teenagers a lucrative market. But not, perhaps, if you are a parent. Hoffman, a father of two grown children, says teen-age drivers are as vulnerable as diplomats in any foreign embassy. "Would you take a kid who had just learned how to swim and drop him off a mile from shore?" Hoffman asks. "Of course you wouldn’t. And yet we take kids who have little experience and put them behind the wheel and let them get into an emergency situation. ... Kids don’t die because they’re bad. They die because they don’t know what to do."

Hoffman doesn’t expect ITI’s latest driver’s course, with an instructional limit of 12 students per class, to be a big money maker. "The equipment and instructors cost $270 a day," just $25 less than the student’s fee. But, he adds, "It needs to be done."

When he volunteered to take ITI’s course, Justin didn’t consider himself a bad driver. Just the opposite. "I thought I was the best driver in the world." Yet, there’s something humbling about knocking down traffic cones and driving under the close scrutiny of instructors who, on other days, train law enforcement officers in the fine art of defensive driving. "I learned that my reaction skills aren’t as good as I thought. I would definitely recommend this course to friends," Justin says.

High school seniors Debra Todd and Lavonya Broaddus from King and Queen Central High School also drove the course during a recent media day. They say the biggest problem with teen-age driving is a lack of attention. "People turn around and talk to someone in the back seat. Some of them are drinking and driving. This course forces you to pay attention," Lavonya says. One convert is Joy Blake, a driver’s education teacher at West Point High School. At first, she was skeptical that parents would bring their children to an out-of-the-way place and plunk down $295. Yet after driving some of the drills, Blake changed her tune. "There’s no way you can mimic this in the classroom with a textbook and a filmstrip."

Figuring I could stand a brush up on driving skills, I drove the course and wiped out a few cones. But I did pretty well with emergency response. When the cardboard comes off, you don’t know what you’re going to see — a curve, a pole, the simulation of a blocked lane — an adrenaline-pumping situation that puts all the senses on full alert. I was inches from one of those traffic poles and managed to brake without knocking it down, proof, I guess, that maturity has some benefits.

This more aggressive-training approach is welcomed by Vanessa Wigand, a state program specialist for Driver’s Education in Virginia’s Department of Education. "We’re looking forward to having this resource for students." She says driver’s education, with only seven instructional sessions behind the wheel, teaches only the basics. "The comparison I like to make is this: If you had seven piano lessons, would you be ready for a piano recital?"

Of course not. As Wigand points out, it takes years of driving to develop good defensive skills. Still, the ITI course is a start; an intense immersion into the skills needed to survive in today’s bumper-car, road-rage world. My lingering concern? I hope teens don’t try the cardboard trick with their friends.

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