March 3, 2005


Drivers’ ed scares lead to questions, doubts

By Kymberli W. Brady
Staff Writer

For every parent, getting a distress call from a child can quickly turn into their worst nightmare when unable to come to their aid.

For Linda Nollette, Feb. 12 started out as a day bathed in the excitement of her daughter Bethany’s first behind-the-wheel driving lesson. Then it turned into an emotional, fear-fraught afternoon, with only a cell phone keeping them connected.

“It was my first lesson—the day after I got my permit,” Bethany says. “When I first saw him, [I thought] oh, this should be fun. Then he started telling disgusting Michael Jackson jokes and I went ‘ew.’”

“At 12:03, Bethany called and said she didn’t know where she was,” Linda adds. “She said the instructor went into a shopping center and told her he would be back in five or 10 minutes, but he hadn’t come back. All she could tell me was that she was somewhere in the Silver Creek/Aborn area, but she wasn’t sure where.”

Linda says she then called Advantage Driving School, and they attempted to reach the instructor, 52-year-old John Bruick on his cell phone. She warned that she would give them five minutes to reach him before she went looking herself.

According to Bethany, he finally returned—with a bag of groceries.

“He just said, ‘I’m going to take my 10-minute break now,’” she remembers. “It was hot. He left me in the car with the windows up and no keys. He was gone for 25 minutes.”

“I bought a sandwich and a soda,” claims Bruick. “I was in there maybe 15 minutes, but I feel bad and shouldn’t have done it.”

“I got him on the phone and asked him what the - - - was he doing?” adds Linda. “He told me he was entitled to a break. I said he wasn’t, and demanded that he bring her straight home.”

According to her calculations, Bethany was approximately 11 miles—a very long 17 minutes away. But when they hadn’t returned by 12:55, she called the school and spoke with owner Randy Zimmer.

“I asked Randy if I should be worried,” she remembers. “He said no, that he had been there for three years.”

She then tried to reach Bethany on her cell phone, but to no avail.

“I didn’t answer it,” Bethany admits ironically. “My mom told me never to get on the phone while I was driving.”

Linda remembers the frantic moment at 1:05, when she decided to call the police and report her daughter missing. While on the phone, the car pulled into the driveway, nearly an hour after that first call.

“He didn’t bring her directly home,” Linda exclaims. “Instead, he drove her to his next client in the Silver Creek area.”

“He went to pick up another kid,” Bethany adds. “I guess we were in his neighborhood and he had me practice parallel parking for 20 minutes before he drove me back to my house.”

For Bethany, things quickly turned from uncomfortable to terrified. After Bruick returned to the car and spoke with her mom, she claims his attitude changed dramatically.

“He would tell me three seconds before he wanted me to make a right hand turn,” she says. “But I would be in the left lane and had to cross three lanes of traffic. I felt it put my safety in jeopardy. He was so rude the entire time and I was scared because we were still 20 minutes away from my house.”

Setting things straight
Since 1995, Advantage Driving School has trained nearly 28,500 kids—3,600 from Almaden alone, Zimmer admits they cannot please everybody. He maintains that sometimes, an instructor will fall short of expectations, but tales like this certainly aren’t the type that he likes to hear.

“We are Almaden’s driving school,” he says. “We live in Almaden. I teach in Almaden and our kids go to school there. We donate thousands of dollars to area schools, supporting sports programs, as well as Little League teams and the Almaden Valley Youth Counseling Ser-vice. We feel we are a positive influence on the community and if there’s a problem, I want to deal with it.”

Zimmer maintains that while this is an isolated incident, he admits there may be times where a lesson isn’t just about driving in the car. If an instructor feels that a student needs reinforcement of the rules of the road or wants to talk about how their lesson is going, he’ll pull them off to the side of the road.

“Just because they weren’t driving for two hours,” says Zimmer, “doesn’t mean that they weren’t being instructed for the entire two hours. However, there’s no question he did the wrong thing. I told her I was sorry and that we wanted to make it right. We offered her a free two-hour class and then agreed to refund her money, but there was no making it right for [the mother].”

It’s not the first time Zimmer has had to deal with scandal. In 1997, the school was rocked when a 23-year-old instructor became involved with a student, prompting a sexual harassment charge, for which he was convicted. However, a pending lawsuit prohibits him from discussing the case in detail.

“He is absolutely not still with the school anymore,” Zimmer exclaims. “But it was a horrible experience for both of them. Because of that incident, we now have a strict, written zero-tolerance policy regarding behavior in the cars.

“Its scary,” admits Linda. “You put your teenager in the car with someone you don’t know and you wonder, ‘how safe is this person I’m putting my kid in the car with?’”

Filing a complaint
Filing a complaint against a school and/or instructor is required to be in writing, which will prove easier in the long run, as the phone number listed on the DMV Web site for the Driving School Compliance Unit [(916) 657-6077] has been disconnected. Additionally, numerous attempts to reach the number listed for questions regarding driving school complaints resulted in no more than a recording that stated their operating hours—no matter when it was called.

The Web site does however, post a list of frequently asked questions about driving and traffic school complaints and can be found by logging on to http://www.dmv.ca.gov/vehindustry/ol/complaints_faq.htm.

It is better to try to resolve the issue with the school, as the DMV will not give legal advice or discuss a case prior to investigating a complaint. They will not act as a go between to settle a dispute, nor will they facilitate the settlement of a contract dispute between a driving school or a traffic violator school and their customers. They will not investigate complaints against private parties, unless the complaint is about activity with an unlicensed driving school or traffic violator school owner, operator or instructor.

While former generations were indoctrinated into the world of driving by their high school coaches during the school day, today teenagers must pay a high price [$325] for a less supervised form of outsourcing. Parents still argue that for what instructions cost, their kids should be on the road the full time, and that doesn’t mean chauffeuring the instructor around to do their errands.

Complaints must be submitted in writing and sent to Driving School Program Administration Unit, Occupational Licensing, P.O. BOX 932342L228, SACRAMENTO, CA 94232.