It’s been 20 years since Wisconsin stopped paying for driver’s education classes for high schoolers, forcing many students to defer the rite of passage of getting a driver’s license. Nationally, the percentage of teens 16-19 having driver’s licenses has dropped from 64% in 1995 to less than 40% in 2021.
But, amid widening concerns about young people driving recklessly, that life changing status for students is expected to make a comeback, thanks a new state law offering free driver’s ed to qualified students. The law, authored by Rep. Bob Donovan (R-Greenfield) and passed nearly unanimously, allocates $6 million in grants to allow students eligible for free or reduced cost school lunches to complete driver’s education classes at no cost to them.
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Donovan, who worked with nonpartisan advocacy group Common Ground to introduce the bill, cited rampant reckless driving in Milwaukee. “We all benefit when more and more individuals are taught how to appropriately drive a vehicle,” Donovan says. State figures for Milwaukee County in 2022 show 165 crashes involving teen drivers in which speed was a factor. Those wrecks resulted in seven fatalities and 254 injuries. Overall, teen drivers were in 770 crashes that caused injuries; those crashes killed 10 people and injured 1,132.
Common Ground is a nonpartisan community group with 40,000 members in Milwaukee, Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee counties. In a 2021 listening campaign about the problems facing metropolitan Milwaukee, reckless driving was the No. 1 complaint of nearly 1,000 people interviewed, says Jennifer O’Hear, Common Ground’s executive director. Older people especially said they were not going out at night because they feared that they would be in a car accident, she adds.
Common Ground asked Donovan to help “because he’s been a leader in trying to tackle reckless driving,” O’Hear says.
Donovan remembers taking a driver’s education course and learning about terrible accidents caused by “the repercussions of driving recklessly and speeding and running red lights.”
The new program won’t solve all the reckless driving problems, “but it is certainly a step in the right direction,” he says.
The DOT estimates that about 128,000 students a year will qualify for the free driving classes, which typically cost about $450 to $600. It was unclear when the free driver’s ed courses would begin; the DOT expects this summer to begin accepting grant applications from driver education schools.
The $6 million that the new law will annually set aside for the program will come from the fees and payments that the insurance industry makes to the state, Donovan says.
To get a driver’s license in Wisconsin, people under 18 must complete a driver’s education course that as well as at least 50 hours of supervised behind-the-wheel driving experience, of which at least 10 hours are driving in the dark.
Khalil Stewart is 16, a junior at Pathways High School in Milwaukee and testified for the bill to the legislators. He says he told them that he wants more kids to have a chance to get a license. “It’s something that’s important,” he says, “but it takes money to do it.”
Jahmorris Torres Currin, a recent Pathways graduate who also spoke to legislators, says the cost of private lessons kept him from getting a license. The new law makes sense to him because it gives younger adults a chance to drive with an instructor: “And that way they won’t have to learn by themselves.”
Shankayla Caldwell, 18, a senior at Pathways, says she has some cousins who drive without having a driver’s license. She has driven with them, “and I sometimes see them speeding real bad. … In some school zones, they go 45 mph.”
She wants to get her license. “I want to do things on my own,” she says. “It’s a big deal to have that freedom to do it.”
