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| Next generation of young drivers hit the streets |
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| News | |||
| Written by Michelle Sprehe | |||
| Friday, 03 July 2009 09:27 | |||
 Watch out Miami County, a new group of drivers is hitting the pavement this summer. But don’t be too worried yet, they’re still in training. You’re bound to see one of the 250 student drivers from Paola, Osawatomie or Louisburg practicing on the streets and highways, if you haven’t already.Though Paola students take their driver’s education course online and Osawatomie and Louisburg students take theirs in a classroom, every student has to practice six hours of driving with an instructor and six hours of riding while another student drives. Multiply that 12-hour requirement by 250 students and that’s 3,000 hours of student drivers on the road. Most students taking driver’s education courses are 14 or 15 years old. Current Kansas law says that completion of a driver’s education course is not needed to get an instructional permit, however it is required to get a restricted permit. D.J. King has been a driver’s education instructor for nine years and currently teaches students from the Osawatomie school district. “I’ve got lots of gray hair to prove I’m a driving instructor,” King said jokingly. Students entering the car with King have to hand over any cellular phones for him to keep during the lesson so there will not be any distractions. When riding with students, King uses his own jargon with terms such as “creep,” meaning to drive slowly, “point-of-no-return,” which means once a student chooses to go through a yellow light, they can’t stop and “Jackie Chan,” meaning to turn the wheel using quick hand-over-hand motions. “Driver’s ed is great for unlearning bad habits like grabbing the wheel underneath it,” King said. “The most detrimental thing is when parents don’t let kids practice at all.” King spends between six and eight hours riding in a car with students each day. “Basically, I drive far enough to go to Denver, and where do I end up? Right back home,” King said. “It’s kind of like treading water.” Josh Godfrey and Hollie McKinney, both 15, spent their last day of driving with King last week. “I’m excited about driving because the freedom to get out of the house,” McKinney said. “I’ll get to go anywhere I want, pretty much.” Godfrey agreed with McKinney and said he is excited to be able to drive so he can leave when he wants to and not have to wait on someone else. King said he checks each driver for proficiency in driving areas such as decision-making and reaction time. He also added that student drivers need to be somewhat aggressive. “You wouldn’t think about that in driver’s ed, but they have to (be aggressive),” King said. “I want them to be cautious, but not over cautious. If someone’s a block away they want to wait for them.” A lot of the students King sees for the first time are over-cautious, he said, and some tend to be very nervous. “I keep a towel in the car to wipe sweat off the steering wheel,” he said. King has never had a student in an accident while teaching, he said as he knocked on wood for luck.
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