Next Tuesday, March 3, the Public Education Committee in the Texas House will hold a hearing on HB 339, which is authored by State Representative Larry Phillips. This bill is designed to address teen driver safety and includes almost everyone's ideas about how improve it. One of the ideas it contains is a suggestion of Pat Barrett of Driver Ed in a Box®. His idea is that the state would be required to publicly post on an annual basis the teen crash rates of every entity that offers driver education. This would allow the public to examine each school or program and see what kind of record their graduates have. This would be similar to public schools being rated on the performance of their students.
We support this because in 1995 Texas passed a law allowing parents to teach their children to drive using a program approved by DPS (Department of Public Safety). Before it was even implemented, leaders in both the Texas House and Senate tried to repeal the law, and it was the home school community that killed that effort. In almost every legislative session since then, the commercial driving school lobby has sought to make it more difficult for parents to teach their children to drive, and the Texas home school community has killed each and every attempt.
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