Safer Roads: OD House Bill No. 70. By Will Poellnitz

Old Dominion House Bill No. 70

By Will Poellnitz

    Many of the students at MGA this weekend are sure to want to be familiar with HB 70, which concerns driver’s education.  Students already receive standardized instruction concerning aggressive driving, distracted driving, motorcycle awareness, fuel-efficient driving practices, and traffic stops. This bill  will add education on  automobile maintenance to that list.  According to the bill’s patron Eve Maddock, the goal of this bill is to encourage self-reliance in teenagers, increase safety on the roads, and reduce the stress involved with the ownership of a vehicle for teens.

    According to statistics found by Maddock, 42.2% of teens feel uncomfortable with changing a tire.  26% feel unprepared to change their oil.  It’s statistics like these and personal experience that caused Maddock to pursue this topic.  During the house session, multiple delegates shared their own experiences with automobile maintenance and expressed their frustration in not knowing much about it.  As teens grow older, they can’t rely on their parents to fix every issue they come upon, and it is a school’s job to prepare teens for adulthood.  This bill will ensure that students leave high school well-prepared to be safe and knowledgeable drivers.

    When examining the arguments made for/against the bill, the issue of how the new instruction would fit into the existing curriculum was a major point of debate.  Delegates were also unsure of the way this instruction would be taught.  It was explained that the new instruction would be added like any new information to a curriculum, and it would only require more time to teach.  As to how it would be taught, that isn’t included in the legislation itself.  Whether the teaching is hands-on or in video format is up to the educators to decide.  Another question was whether maintenance work would be part of a driver’s license test, to which Maddock proposes that  it would not be.

    In the end, this bill passed with a vast majority of support, showing that MGA participants support their fellow teens by saying they  need to be prepared to face real-world problems.