More than 550 commercial driving schools in the U.S. that train truckers and bus drivers must close after investigators found they employed unqualified instructors, failed to adequately test students and had other safety issues, the federal Transportation Department announced Wednesday.
The move marks the Transportation Department’s latest effort to improve safety in the trucking industry. And unlike its previous actions last fall to decertify up to 7,500 schools that included many defunct operations, this latest step is focused on what it deemed were active schools with significant shortcomings that inspectors identified in 1,426 site visits.
The department has been aggressively going after states that handed out commercial driver’s licenses to immigrants who shouldn’t have qualified for them ever since a fatal crash in August. A truck driver that Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says was not authorized to be in the U.S. made an illegal U-turn and caused a crash in Florida that killed three people. Other fatal crashes since then, including one in Indiana earlier this month that killed four, have only added to the concerns.
Duffy said 448 schools failed to meet basic safety standards. Inspectors found shortcomings such as employing unqualified instructors, failing to test students’ skills or teach them how to handle hazardous materials and using the wrong equipment to teach drivers. An additional 109 schools removed themselves from the registry of schools when they learned that inspectors were planning to visit.
“American families should have confidence that our school bus and truck drivers are following every letter of the law and that starts with receiving proper training before getting behind the wheel,” Duffy said.
The schools that officials want to decertify now are generally smaller ones, including a number of programs run by school districts. Five of the bigger, more reputable schools represented by the national Commercial Vehicle Training Assn. were audited, but those all passed.
Jeffery Burkhardt, who is chair of the national trucking schools group, said established schools welcome the new enforcement effort to eliminate bad schools that aren’t meeting the standards. He said these audits mark the first time regulators have enforced the standards for driving schools that were passed in 2022.
“There’s no reason to believe that they’re not going to keep on moving on it, which is good. You know, the good players have no problem with it. Absolutely none,” said Burkhardt, who is also senior director of operations at Ancora, which provides commercial driver’s license training at colleges, community colleges and companies.
An additional 97 schools are currently under investigation for compliance issues.
Part of the problem in the trucking industry is that schools and trucking companies can essentially self-certify when they apply to begin operating, observers note, and questionable operations might not be caught until much later when the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration gets a chance to audit them.
It wasn’t immediately clear how many students were enrolled at these schools that are being decertified or how many graduated with questionable qualifications. A Transportation Department spokeswoman said officials may follow up on those graduates later. Burkhardt said that hopefully most of the unqualified drivers were weeded out before they got on the highway by the skills tests that states administer before handing out commercial licenses.
There is some cushion in the industry right now because there are currently more drivers than needed in the midst of a 10% drop in shipments since 2022 because of the economic uncertainty. But many trucking companies still struggle to find enough well-qualified drivers with clean records.
In addition to threatening to withhold federal funding from states that don’t clean up their commercial driver’s license programs, the Trump administration has been focused on making sure truck drivers meet English proficiency standards. California is the only state to lose funding so far.
Funk writes for the Associated Press.
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