Texas, Pennsylvania lead states in CDL school shutdowns

Texas and Pennsylvania had the largest number of brick-and-mortar commercial driver training schools affected by the Department of Transportation’s sweeping crackdown on CDL training providers announced Monday.

DOT provided a state-by-state breakdown showing 13 schools each in Texas and Pennsylvania, followed by 11 in California, 10 in Florida and nine in Utah, according to information provided by the agency to Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin.

The breakdown comes a day after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced what he called an emergency shutdown of 110 commercial driver training schools that federal officials identified through an analysis of drivers cited for English-language proficiency violations.

“These are driving schools that account for 5,000 of the violations for English proficiency,” Duffy said Monday during a news conference in Detroit. “There’s 110 of them through a data analysis that are the greatest offenders. As of today, those schools are shut down.”

The state-by-state breakdown released by DOT includes: StateCDL schools impactedTexas13Pennsylvania13California11Florida10Utah9Ohio7New Jersey3New York3Wisconsin3Arizona2Colorado1Idaho1Maryland1New Mexico1North Carolina1Oregon1South Carolina1Virginia1Washington1West Virginia1Physical-location total84 DOT also said 23 additional training schools operated online and had no physical location, and Duffy has ordered a review of those providers.

The 84 schools identified by state plus the 23 online providers account for 107 schools. DOT’s state breakdown therefore does not fully account for the 110 schools Duffy said Monday were subject to emergency removal. Federal officials have not released a complete list identifying all of the schools by name.

Texas, Pennsylvania, California account for nearly half of physical schools Texas, Pennsylvania and California together accounted for 37 of the 84 physical-location schools, or about 44% of those identified in DOT’s state breakdown.

Adding Florida and Utah brings the five states’ combined total to 56 schools, representing two-thirds of the physical-location providers identified by DOT. The geographic breakdown provides the first detailed look at where the schools targeted in the federal crackdown were operating.

Monday’s initial announcement did not provide a complete list of the affected schools or their locations. FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs said Monday that every school targeted for emergency removal had trained at least 10 drivers who were subsequently cited during roadside inspections for failing to meet federal English-language proficiency requirements.

Collectively, the schools certified more than 5,000 drivers later cited for those violations. Federal regulations require entry-level driver training providers to teach drivers about English-language proficiency requirements and certify that trainees meet applicable standards before completing training.

Barrs specifically identified ASC Technical Institute in Texas, saying it certified 58 drivers who were later cited for English-language proficiency violations. Barrs said one of its former trainees subsequently ran a stop sign and killed a man in Texas.

He also identified Platinum Plus Truck Driving School in California, which he said certified 36 drivers later cited for English-language proficiency violations. One of those trainees was involved in a fatal crash in Oklahoma, according to Barrs.

Why it matters: The state breakdown shows the CDL training crackdown is concentrated in several major trucking states, with Texas, Pennsylvania, California, Florida and Utah accounting for two-thirds of the physical-location schools identified by DOT. The post Texas, Pennsylvania lead states in CDL school shutdowns appeared first on FreightWaves.