Ten students in the driver education class at Middlebury Union High School held detached steering wheels, Frisbees and dinner plates. Their teacher, George Rooney, was demonstrating the proper technique for gripping the wheel, specifically the importance of keeping their hands in the “nine and three” positions, which correspond to the digits on a clockface. Holding a vintage steering wheel, he highlighted what could go wrong, beyond just failing the road test, if their hands were in the wrong place.
“This is from a 1975 Corvette,” Rooney said, rubbing the steering wheel’s metal spokes, which were sharp enough to cut off the driver’s finger in a front-end collision. But modern steering wheels are dangerous in other ways, he said.
“Why am I making such a big deal about where my hands are?” Rooney asked the class.
“The airbag?” one student suggested.
Rooney nodded, explaining how an explosive charge inflates the airbag at 200 miles per hour.
“Think about that when someone is driving along with a dog in their lap,” he said. In a crash, “you’re gonna wear that dog like a tattoo.”
For most teens, getting a driver’s license is a life-altering rite of passage. In much of Vermont, where public transportation is limited or nonexistent, the ability to drive can be essential for attending college or trade school, holding a job, and achieving personal and financial independence. But due to an ongoing shortage of driver ed teachers at public schools, and the absence of an in-state program for training new instructors to replace the ones who retire, many Vermont teens are finding it hard to learn to drive when they become eligible at age 15.
Rooney’s class is one of the most popular at Middlebury Union, with a waiting list every semester. As the school’s only driver ed teacher — he replaced two previous instructors when he was hired in 2012 — he can teach only 40 students per semester and another dozen each summer, which, he admitted, “is not enough.” Some students must wait until their senior year to get in or else pay for a state-approved private driving school.
“If we want kids to be able to drive safer, we’ve got to have people who can teach them.”
George Rooney
Rooney really wants students to avoid their third option, which is the route he took as a teen: Forgo driver ed altogether, then wait until their 18th birthday, when they can take the Department of Motor Vehicles road test and get licensed without it.
“I went to the ‘school of dad,’” said Rooney, 56, whose high school on Long Island didn’t offer driver ed. “I had four lessons and spent the next 35 years unlearning everything he taught me.”
By law, all 57 high schools in Vermont must offer driver ed, including to home-schooled students. But due to tight budgets, some schools, especially those in smaller districts in southern Vermont and the Northeast Kingdom, cannot afford to hire their own driving instructors and must share one with neighboring districts — or contract with a private driving academy — which further limits their capacity.
The combination of high student demand, limited class sizes and student schedules that are often jam-packed with extracurricular activities means that some teens graduate without any formal driving instruction whatsoever. Traffic safety experts warn that putting inexperienced and untrained drivers on the roads greatly increases their odds of getting a ticket or being involved in a serious crash.
“If we want kids to be able to drive safer,” Rooney said, “we’ve got to have people who can teach them.”
Vermont’s driver ed teacher shortage is fueled by a combination of factors, including a pool of instructors who are nearing, or beyond, the normal age of retirement.
Joseph Barch, 66, a part-time driver ed teacher at Mount Mansfield Union High School in Jericho, said he could have retired years ago, but the school would have had to reduce the number of students who take driver ed. It’s one reason Barch started 802 Driving School, which mostly serves students in Chittenden County who can’t get into driver ed.
Like many private driving academies in Vermont, 802 Driving School’s classes book up quickly, sometimes six months in advance. Some parents ask Barch if he could provide their child with the DMV-mandated six hours of in-car instruction so they can pass an online driver ed class. Barch won’t do it, because many online programs aren’t approved by the Vermont Agency of Education or the DMV.
As recently as three years ago, nine high schools in the state had no driving instructors on staff. Why aren’t more educators getting the endorsement to teach it?
As Barch explained, the training program can be costly and time-consuming, requiring eight college-level courses, none of which is offered in Vermont. The nearest program, at White Mountains Community College in New Hampshire, has plenty of spaces and is taught almost entirely online, according to program coordinator Michael Doucette. Nevertheless, school districts typically won’t cover the cost of teachers’ tuition, as some did in years past.
Expanding a high school’s existing program is also expensive. An in-class driving simulator, like the two at Middlebury Union, can cost $15,000 or more. Even without such technology, Barch said, there’s the expense of buying a driver ed car, which schools cannot use for other purposes, as well as insurance, gas, tires and routine maintenance. “Brakes are a big one,” he said.
“And the problem is, schools have to pass school budgets,” said Barbara Brody, 71, a mostly retired driver ed instructor and former administrator from Underhill who taught for more than 40 years. While schools are required to offer driver education, she added, students aren’t guaranteed a spot that fits their schedule.
Middlebury Union High School junior Maggie Morter of Cornwall tried to enroll in Rooney’s driver ed class as a sophomore last fall but couldn’t get in. She took it in the spring, just in time for her 16th birthday. But her older brother couldn’t get into the class at the high school, so he signed up for Road Ready Driving School in Addison. Morter estimated that 40 percent of her friends took driver ed privately, mostly because they wanted their licenses at 16 to drive to school, jobs and team practices.
“I’ve heard from other people that it’s been a struggle to get into driver ed,” she added. “It was much easier when it was built into my [school] schedule.”
But private driving schools, which typically cost $800 or more, aren’t affordable to many Vermonters. For the past four years, Brody has been teaching driver ed at Spectrum Youth & Family Services, which serves young people who are homeless, at risk, recent immigrants or in the state’s foster care system. For those individuals, a driver’s license is not just a luxury for commuting to and from school and extracurricular activities. It can mean the difference between a family having another breadwinner or not.
Every school has a slightly different process for enrolling students in driver ed. Typically, parents need to understand the system, advocate for their child and be persistent — all qualities that are far less common among Spectrum’s clients, said Chris Smith, the nonprofit’s chief clinical officer. If parents or caregivers can’t speak English, don’t know how to navigate the system, and get materials sent home in a language they can’t read, those youths are far less likely to get into the class.
“And if you’re a young person bouncing between high schools … it’s really hard,” Smith added. “We see [driver ed], in some ways, as a harm-reduction activity, because a lot of these youths are driving anyway.”
Indeed, the social costs are considerable when young people don’t learn to drive from a qualified professional. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, teen drivers who have not completed driver ed are 75 percent more likely than their peers to get a traffic ticket and 24 percent more likely to get in a crash resulting in injury or death. In Vermont and nationally, motor vehicle wrecks are the single leading cause of death for 16- to 24-year-olds.
During the 2023-24 legislative session, Sen. Ruth Hardy (D-Addison) introduced a bill, at Rooney’s request, that would have required all new licensed drivers to have taken driver ed, regardless of their age. The bill, S.210, also would have created a standardized curriculum as well as opportunities to get more people certified as instructors. The bill never made it out of committee.
There have been modest efforts to address Vermont’s driving instructor shortage. During the 2023-24 school year, the Agency of Education ran a pilot project with the Vermont Virtual Learning Collaborative to offer three online driver ed courses, each serving 10 to 20 students, taught by a licensed instructor. While the education agency considered the pilot a success, it had only one certified instructor who could teach it, which prevented the program’s expansion.
The irony is that fewer teens are eager to drive compared to earlier generations. In 1983, 80 percent of all 18-year-olds in the U.S. had a driver’s license. By 2021, that number had fallen to 60 percent, according to Federal Highway Administration data. The reasons, as several local driving instructors explained, include heightened levels of anxiety among teens and the fact that young people tend to congregate in virtual spaces rather than physical ones.
Sen. Hardy, who introduced the bill to mandate driver ed for all drivers, has three daughters. Her older two both drive, including one who took Rooney’s class at Middlebury. But her youngest daughter? “No interest,” she said.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Taking the Wheel | In Vermont, a driver’s license is a teen’s ticket to freedom. So why is it so hard to get into driver ed?”
This article appears in Sep 17-23 2025.
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