As federal regulators intensify their crackdown on commercial driver training providers, a veteran truck driver in Georgia is preparing to open a school built around a different philosophy: fewer students, more time behind the wheel and stronger preparation for the realities drivers face once they leave the classroom.
Shawn Gresham, the founder of Trucking Life Academy in Dalton, Georgia, told FreightWaves that the problems surrounding commercial driver training extend well beyond fraudulent or noncompliant schools.
Gresham has spent 17 years driving commercially and says he has accumulated more than 1 million miles. In his view, many legitimate schools accomplish their basic mission helping students obtain a commercial driver’s license but do not always prepare them adequately for professional life after earning that license.
“Schools just help you get the license, and that’s just kind of what we got accustomed to,” Gresham said. “It was a status quo.”
His perspective changed further after he began training drivers himself.
Gresham recalled one particularly concerning phone call involving a newly licensed driver who was descending a mountain and did not know which gear to select. When Gresham asked about the driver’s trainer, he was told that the trainer was asleep.
According to Gresham, the way some carriers structure trainer compensation can create incentives for trainers to function more like team drivers rather than actively teach the people riding with them.
“The trainer needs to go to sleep every night and do their 10-hour break, period,” Gresham said, referring to changes he introduced while overseeing trainers at Rosedale Transport. “You’re better off paying the trainer a little more money and have them actually train.”
Small classes and eight weekends
Trucking Life Academy is scheduled to open Oct. 18, subject to approval from the Georgia Department of Driver Services. Gresham said the fire marshal had already inspected the facility and that the school was waiting for the remaining licensing steps when he spoke with FreightWaves.
The academy plans to keep its classes to six students. Initially, the program will be conducted on weekends over an eight-week period.
Students will also train on manual-transmission trucks. Gresham believes that learning to operate a manual transmission gives students a better understanding of how different commercial truck driving is from operating a passenger vehicle.
Tuition for the Class A CDL program is planned at $3,795.
Gresham said students who have not acquired the necessary skills by the end of the course will be able to continue training without paying additional tuition.
“If you come here and you’re not ready, you’ll just keep going to school until you get it,” he said.
The academy is also intended to provide an alternative for working students who might otherwise enter carrier-sponsored training programs that can require drivers to stay with an employer or repay training expenses.
By holding classes on weekends, Gresham said, students can continue working while completing their driver training.
‘It’s the whole industry’
For inexperienced drivers, backing remains one of the most obvious challenges. But Gresham believes another problem is more difficult to quantify: whether new drivers are truly prepared to deal with the pressure and demands of professional trucking.
A driver can be expected to handle heavy traffic and severe weather while simultaneously dealing with fatigue, appointment schedules, dispatchers and potentially long waits at loading docks.
“It’s not just about textbook,” Gresham said.
Schools can teach the mechanics of backing a truck, he said, but professional drivers also need to understand how to remain calm when several pressures arrive at once.
“That there, I think, is something that’s not mandated in schools,” Gresham said.
His program will also focus on communication. Students are expected to learn how to deal with dispatchers, brokers and safety departments, as well as how to identify situations where operational pressure begins to conflict with safe driving practices.
For Gresham, that means improving CDL training cannot be left entirely to driving schools.
“Yes, it’s schools, but it’s the whole industry,” he said.
Drivers are helping build the academy
According to Gresham, Trucking Life Academy has been built largely with support from truck drivers and businesses.
The school has received two trucks and a trailer through donations, while drivers and other supporters have provided additional equipment and supplies. Some drivers have also helped students by sponsoring tuition for people who otherwise could not afford the program.
One of the donated trucks came from a diesel business in the Dalton area. Gresham said the company’s owner had encountered inadequately prepared drivers through his towing work.
Another truck, a 2014 Freightliner, was donated by an owner-operator whom Gresham had trained previously. Gresham said a supporter covered the fuel costs required to bring the truck from Florida, while a Dalton leasing company donated a trailer.
The academy’s relatively low overhead, Gresham said, makes it possible to maintain small classes while giving students additional instruction when necessary.
He had previously considered bringing in outside investors but ultimately rejected the idea after determining that the financial model would likely require the school to train larger numbers of students and move them through the program faster than he wanted.
Gresham wants greater scrutiny of instructors
If he had the opportunity to make recommendations to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, Gresham said he would put particular attention on the people responsible for teaching new drivers.
“I would recommend that the instructors have a good record, a clean record,” he said. “If a driver’s had suspensions and he’s had wrecks and he doesn’t have a clean record, then how are you having [him] teach the next generation of drivers?”
He also supports requirements designed to prevent schools from enrolling large numbers of students without having enough trucks or adequate facilities to provide meaningful hands-on training.
Gresham recalled working with a driver who had attended another CDL school. The driver told him that 17 students had been sharing a single truck.
According to Gresham, the student would arrive at 5 a.m., spend much of the day waiting and receive only two 30-minute opportunities to practice backing.
“But as long as he was there in line, paid his $5,000, he got the test and got his license,” Gresham said.
For Gresham, the current federal scrutiny of CDL training providers could therefore lead to a broader discussion. The issue is not only which schools should be allowed to operate, but also what happens between the moment a driver earns a CDL and the point at which that driver becomes a competent professional behind the wheel.
“We’ve got to get back to the focus of making sure that driver succeeds,” he said.
Why it matters: Federal enforcement can remove fraudulent CDL schools from the system, but Gresham’s experience points to a broader safety issue: whether drivers graduating from compliant programs receive enough practical preparation to operate safely once they begin working professionally.
