How Lane County is working to expand driving instruction access

Where Heidi Shayla grew up, learning to drive was a necessity. 

Shayla was much younger than 15 when she started driving her dad’s old pickup truck through the fields of Deadwood, a town in the mountains 13 miles northeast of Mapleton. She had to, in order to help her dad feed the cattle. She would drive with pillows stacked behind her so she could reach the pedals, while he would throw hay to the animals.

Once she got her learner’s permit, her dad then spent hundreds of hours teaching her how to drive on the road. She passed her driving test in the 1980s at 16 with flying colors. 

A month later, however, while she was driving home from Florence and distracted by a conversation with her friend, she rear-ended someone.

“It was one of those things where I understood the mechanics of how to drive a car really well, but I didn’t know anything about risk management,” she said.

Luckily, no one was hurt. Shayla tells the story to illustrate why it’s important for teens to take a driver’s education course, where risk management is part of the curriculum. 

Teens in Oregon are not required to complete a driver’s ed class in order to get their license, and due to many barriers — lack of instructors, location of schools, cost, language, funding and scheduling — up to 70% do not take the course according to a 2017 study. A 2023 Washington study found that drivers aged 18-24 who don’t take a driver’s ed course are 70% times more likely to be in a major accident.

As the driver education coordinator at Lane Council of Governments, Shayla is pushing hard to change this in Lane County. She hopes to increase access to driver’s ed instruction through community collaboration and putting extra emphasis on low-income and rural teens.

Why teens aren’t taking driver’s ed

Shayla spent eight months researching why people aren’t getting the driver’s education they need in Lane County and how other communities have solved access issues.

What she found was complex. The top reason:  a shortage of driving instructors, made worse when many instructors left programs during COVID due to lack of work. 

Shayla went through a course in Eugene to become a driving instructor in order to learn more about it. Training to become an instructor is extensive, requiring  60 hours of class time over 10 weeks and a large homework load. Shayla compared it to a 100-level college course.

Many people are taking the course on top of a full-time job and family obligations, Shayla said, and some traveled from over an hour away. She had people in her class from Alsea, Albany and Seattle (Many Washingtonians receive driving instructor training in Oregon due to the state’s own troubles with driver’s education.) Shayla said a third of her class dropped out due to the high demands of the class and the inflexible schedule.

With not enough driving instructors to go around, teens often are put on waiting lists to go through driver’s ed, and teens in rural areas are forced to travel to Eugene or Springfield for classes. All driver’s ed schools in Lane County are privately owned, Shayla said.

Annabel and Ian Birchak are a driving instructor couple who own Pacific Northwest Driving Academy in Eugene. Demand for their services is high, they said.

The couple just started their winter session and had at least 20 students on their waitlist. In the past, it’s been as high as 50. Their spring session, which starts at the end of March, is almost full. And desperation hits like clockwork every time a term is about to start.

“I’ve been getting calls really pulling at the heartstrings to see if we have a seat for them,” Ian Birchak said.

The Birchaks keep their costs lower than most driver’s ed courses, using Zoom classroom instruction. This lets them charge $299 for the course, much less than other Lane County courses, which typically run $390–$685 for 15- to 18-year-olds according to Shayla’s research. 

Ian Birchak said they attract lower-income and rural students who cannot spend the money or time to attend in-person driver’s ed courses in the area, although their students still have to travel to Eugene to do the required six hours of behind the wheel driving instruction.

Oregon does not allow self-paced online modules for the classroom-learning portion of driver’s ed, nor does it allow classroom and behind the wheel instruction to be separated; they must run concurrently.  (Other states have granted these options to lower barriers.) During COVID, however, Oregon did start allowing Zoom instruction, which they have allowed to continue.

Plans for a safer future

Working within the confines of Oregon law, Shayla is getting creative in her pursuit of improving drivers ed for Lane County.

She learned about a program in Coquille, Oregon, where a school district and county paid for a school resource officer to get trained in driving instruction in order to provide driver’s ed for high schoolers. The district does the administrative work, including family communications and department of transportation paperwork, and the deputy does the classes. In Ohio, rural counties have created a driver’s education consortium to serve teens using primarily school district employees as instructors.

Shayla has imagined similar scenarios in rural towns in Lane County. Partnering with Western Oregon University and the Oregon Department of Transportation, she is creating a pilot program in 2026 to get more people certified in driving instruction in rural areas. This year, she’s also establishing a work group to plan for the future and a Lane County-specific informational website about local drivers ed opportunities and the permitting process.

Her end goal is to create a regional driver education consortium, similar to Ohio’s program, funded through grants and cost sharing across public entities. She will work to expand Zoom instruction access and bring together county officials and school districts to brainstorm how to bring behind-the-wheel instruction to rural teens. She also wants to set up scholarship opportunities.

Being from a rural area where everyone drove everywhere, Shayla has seen the impact of not having driver’s ed. Several of Shayla’s classmates from Mapleton High School died in car accidents in their 20s. While the road to a better driver’s ed model for Lane County may be long, Shayla is committed.

“I really want to see this happen,” she said.