It is parallel parking day at Chicago’s Lane Technical High School–not a good day to be an orange traffic cone. Or even to stand near an orange traffic cone.
“We had a cameraman from one of the TV stations out here one day, and he got too close and a kid ran over his foot,” said Darryl Backstrom, a driver education teacher. The cameraman was not injured, Backstrom added, chuckling at the story.
What brought back that memory was the sight of two traffic cones disappearing under the back bumper of a car driven by a student trying desperately to keep from doing just that. One after another, cars pulled in and out of parking spaces marked by the cones. And then it was on to another parking space, and an agonizingly slow loop around the school’s “range,” an enclosed area about half the size of a football field with a roadway winding in a sort of Figure 8.
It is a scene being repeated daily around the area. In Chicago, there are 22 ranges such as this, said Jerry Szukala, who heads Lane Tech’s driver education program. Students from public high schools that don’t have ranges and from private schools that have no driver’s ed programs or programs limited to classroom instruction come to get behind the wheel and log the hours they need to earn a driver’s license.
According to Robert Miller, the Chicago Board of Education’s coordinator of driver education, all of the city’s public schools have facilities for classroom driver’s training, and the 22 that have behind-the-wheel ranges offer after-school programs to accommodate students from other schools.
Ownership of the cars used varies. Szukala said the Chicago Board of Education purchases the cars used in driver’s ed, though, on the range, Lane Tech also has cars that were donated by local dealers and repaired by the auto shop classes. At Homewood-Flossmoor High School in Flossmoor, the cars are rented from local dealers.
All cars have dual brakes for the driver and instructor, and most have automatic transmission. Gary Groh, the head of driver education at New Trier High School in Winnetka, says his school has one manual.
In many ways it is a scene that hasn’t changed much in decades. That is especially true at Lane Tech, where, since the 1930s, students have been learning to parallel park, make three-point turns and other driving skills at what Szukala said is the oldest such range in Illinois and perhaps in the U.S.
“Driver’s education was started in 1923 in Gilbert, Minn.,” said Frank Gruber, who teaches in the College of Engineering at Northern Illinois University and has taught driver’s ed since 1968.
Besides having the first driving range in the state, Lane Tech also was the first to use classroom simulators (pods with a driver’s seat, steering wheel and gearshift) in 1935, said Gruber, explaining how the teacher would stand at the head of the class issuing instructions, such as right turn, left turn to the students in the simulators.
Illinois now requires 30 hours of classroom instruction, six hours behind the wheel (in school) and 25 hours with a parent in order to qualify for a driver’s license.
Students must be 15 and enrolled in a driver’s ed program to get a learner’s permit, which entitles them to drive when accompanied by a licensed adult. Driver’s licenses can be issued to 16-year-olds.
“Kids with very little discipline in their lives will accept discipline here,” said Backstrom, who has just seen a half dozen cars stop on his command. “Because they want that license.”
From his vantage point at New Trier, Groh sees kids every bit as responsible as those when he began teaching driving in 1973. “When they’re with us, they’re fine,” he said. “They take this very seriously.”
How seriously? So much so that many don’t seem to mind having to spend those 25 hours driving with Mom or Dad or another adult (a requirement that took effect this year).
“Other kids (who already have their driver’s license) are laughing at us, but I think the 25 hours is a good idea,” said Emily Aggen, a sophomore at Homewood-Flossmoor High School.
Jose Ramirez, a 16-year-old junior at Lincoln Park High School who is taking driver education at Lane Tech, said the new requirement “gives me a reason to tell my mom she has to drive with me,” he said.
But while students promise that they will satisfy the requirement, there is no way to determine whether they do, other than the signed form their parents will turn in.
“Let’s say they do 10, 12 hours in the car with their kids. That’s more than (the kids) are getting now,” said Jim Fleming, who heads the driver education program at Homewood-Flossmoor.
“This might just be a reality check for the parents who think their kids know everything they need to know about driving” Groh said of the six hours the students spend behind the wheel in driver education classes.
One parent, Sue McKeigue, whose son, Peter, is learning to drive at Homewood-Flossmoor, said the new requirement “seems like kind of a pain, with all the paperwork involved.”
Nevertheless, having gone through this with two other children, she knows the six hours Peter will drive at school is not nearly enough. “You learn the basics, (but) the real experience comes with being on the road,” she said.
One thing that does bother the kids is that it is getting more and more difficult to get into a car to start the process that leads to a driver’s license.
At Homewood-Flossmoor, for example, state funding cuts have trimmed the number of students who can take the driving portion to 168 a year from 450 seven to eight years ago.
“It has definitely meant fewer kids getting their licenses the day they turn 16,” Fleming said, unless they pay for a commercial driving school.
There are schools that offer limited driving programs or no programs. “We do offer class instruction one semester a year after school, but that’s it,” said John Tracy, the dean of St. Ignatius College Prep in Chicago. While some parochial-school students pay for lessons at private driving schools, Tracy said most go after school to the programs at public schools near their homes.
At St. Francis De Sales on the Southeast Side, for example, students can take driver’s ed at nearby George Washington High School, said Nancy Keating, St. Francis registrar.
Each year some 25,000 students receive behind-the-wheel driver’s education at public schools in Chicago, said Miller, of the Board of Education. (Statewide, as of Dec. 31, 1996, there were 111,561 16-year-old drivers, all of whom must have completed driver’s education, according to the Illinois Secretary of State’s office.)
And it’s this experience that will alleviate “the white-knuckle flight,” as Fleming describes some of his students’ first lessons. “Sometimes (they) are so scared they’re shaking.”
Like any good driver’s ed teacher, Fleming is the calmest one in the car.
On a recent day, Fleming took Jessica Belder, a 15-year-old sophomore, and Peter McKeigue out to practice turns in a residential neighborhood near the school. Fleming is calm, his voice even. His students are obviously nervous.
McKeigue made a left turn so sharp it put him on the left side of the street. Fleming quietly reached out toward the steering wheel. From the back seat the move went almost unnoticed except for the fact there are three hands on the wheel.
“Let’s pretend a car was coming,” Fleming tells McKeigue. “Pete, I’m afraid you just hit it.”
Groh said instructors must remain calm. “You can’t be like a parent who goes `Oh my God, you’re going to kill us.’ “
After turning right at an intersection, Fleming quietly informed Belder that he didn’t think she checked to make sure no vehicle was coming. “No,” she agreed. “I didn’t.”
After a tight left turn in which McKeigue rubbed the car against snow piled by the curb, Fleming calmly asked “You’re not late for anything are you?”
Other drivers generally give the students a wide berth. When they do pass, they do so carefully. Nobody honks or does anything to rattle the students.
But Szukala says he sees motorists routinely get angry at the students. “They honk or yell something about going too slowly, when it’s the student who’s going the speed limit,” he said.
By the end of the lesson, McKeigue’s left turns had improved to the point where he was on the right side of the roadway and Belder was looking–and looking and looking–before turning right.
“It’s amazing how quickly they pick it up,’ said Lane Tech’s Szukala. “You can always see improvement.”
That improvement may extend beyond the driver education programs. After years of seeing the effort kids put forth in this class, there is talk that Chicago schools may start using that to their advantage. Miller said the Board of Education is working on a program to tie performance in other classes to the opportunity to take driver education.
If that happens, students may start hearing some real laughing from those who have preceded them. But more smiling from teachers.
