After a long day working a full-time job, Sonya Clark makes her way to class at the Cecil Center of the Florida State College of Jacksonville with one goal in mind: earn a commercial driver’s license. After the sun went down, the lights came on around a small driving range full of buses and large semi-trucks, ready to be driven by students who at the start of class may never have even sat inside one before.
Toward the beginning of the year, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration implemented a long-awaited change in driver training, rolling out the Entry-Level Driver Training mandate. That rule — originally published in 2016 — established a national standard for training and created a list of registered training providers.
Hopefully, say those involved with training the next generation of drivers, it will be felt on the nation’s highways as better trained drivers take to the road In Jacksonville, there are now 18 schools that offer some form of CDL training to the public, with eight of them offering Class A CDL classroom training in theory and behind-the-wheel training on both range and road.
In the past, he said, “there are those types of schools where if you’ve got the money, well, you’ll pass and you’ll get a license and be put you out on the road and you can be somebody else’s headache. Right? And those days are going away,” The mandate also established a database to collect data of all trainings, potentially allowing for future studies to be done on schools and trainings, such as if there is a correlation between accidents and the amount of on-the-road training.To further the initiative to improve commercial driving, states like Florida have invested heavily in the profession, although none of that money has made its way to the First Coast.
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