Safety Experts Doubt Benefits Of Driver's Ed

During her final driving lesson, Sarah Oluich, 16, checks her rearview mirror as instructor Jim Fraser watches traffic on Route 40 in Frederick. She says she's practiced driving with her mother just once. "She's too scared," Oluich says. (Katherine Frey -- The Washington Post)

Teenagers often view driver's education as simply a hurdle toward obtaining provisional licenses, and some who have taken the classes say they seemed hardly worth the effort. "It wasn't serious at all," said Jessica O'Dell, 16, referring to her experience in a private driving school.

O'Dell, whose family paid about $200 for her to attend a two-week course in Waldorf, said her instructor spoke limited English and had difficulty controlling students in class. Some peers listened to music, and others focused on ordering takeout food, she said.

Though she did spend the required time behind the wheel, O'Dell said, she spent most of her time on back roads, not in the areas she would most likely encounter in suburban Charles County.

In Virginia, where driver's education is taught in high schools, the state Department of Education tracks first-year crash rates among students who graduate from commercial and high school driver's education programs. Over the past three years, there has been a slight decline in crashes among graduates of courses taught in Virginia high schools.

"We're not going to crash-proof these children, but they will have the essential knowledge to make good decisions," said Vanessa C. Wigand, the principal specialist in health, physical and driver's education for the state Department of Education. Students are required to log 40 hours of driving time with an adult in Virginia, 10 of them at night.

In Maryland, Montgomery County school board member Patricia O'Neill (Bethesda-Chevy Chase) has joined an increasing number of parents in urging the school system to add a safe driving component to its health education curriculum.

But Sue Akey, a spokeswoman for AAA Mid-Atlantic, said parents need to look at themselves, too.

"This is an easy way to blame somebody, when they have to take responsibility for their children's actions," Akey said. "Parents have to step up to the plate. Even if [teenagers] had a year with a driving teacher, that's nothing compared to the time they spend with the parents in the vehicle."

Getting Parents Involved

Meghan McCafferty, 16, of Clifton tried to take the behind-the-wheel portion of her training at Centreville High School last year, but "the backup was like five months, and I wanted my license the day you can get it."

So McCafferty wound up at a driving school in Springfield.

"It was a really bad experience," she said. "We were supposed to drive six hours, but pretty much you just drove to fast-food places and ate." Because the private driving school itself was backlogged, she said, her instructor told her she was "a really good driver so I didn't need to come to the last class."

When a student was particularly inexperienced, McCafferty said, the instructor asked to speak with the parents. Otherwise, she said, "parents weren't really involved in it at all," except for signing forms and paying for the course.

That was not the case for the Wood family of Charles County. When Laurie Wood's sons began driving, she and her husband, Kenneth, put a driving manual in each boy's hands and quizzed them on its rules.

The boys logged more than Maryland's required 40 hours of supervised driving time and went to driving school, Wood said.

She remembers her older son, Derek, at the dinner table, describing his first lesson behind the wheel -- on the Capital Beltway.

In 1998, Derek, 18, was killed in an automobile crash; he was the passenger of a teenage driver. Now, Wood has teamed with another grieving parent to form a group called Mom's on a Mission. She speaks to teenagers about what it is like to lose a child in a crash.

Wood said that Maryland should return driver's education to the public schools but that there's no substitute for having a parent in the passenger seat as long as possible.

When her younger son, Jared, began driving, Wood and her husband rode with him at all hours, in all conditions and on all types of roads. They also set up an obstacle course in a nearby parking area to practice maneuvers.

"We about drove Jared crazy," she said. "But we were trying to save his life."

Staff writer Rebecca Dana and staff researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.