BIG CHANGES in Testing of Students in Driving Schools

Driving schools have no authority to order a pre-employment test.

In 2019, Watson Enterprises of the Carolinas, LLC, filed a lawsuit challenging the authority of truck driving schools to order DOT pre-employment tests on students who applied to the schools. With the subsequent ruling, Watson successfully overturned what has been a practice for almost 20 years. It was determined that the driving school “was not an employer of the student drivers”, and that “the school was not a motor carrier”. Hence, driving schools have no authority to order a pre-employment test.
 
FMCSA has clarified that a driving school can test an employee ONLY when the student is actually an employee of the school, working for the school, and is involved in commercial transportation (movement of goods or passengers for hire), OR when the school leases a Commercial Motor Vehicle to the student for the purpose of commercial transportation. Neither of these are very likely to happen.
 
Unless one of those conditions exist, a truck driving school has no authority to require students to submit to DOT tests.
 

Here is a link to an interpretation from FMCSA:
https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/drug-alcohol-testing/applicability-part-382-student-drivers-and-driver-training-schools

So how will a truck driving school know that a student has a negative pre-employment test?

Student drivers will have to register on the Clearinghouse AND enroll in a C/TPA.. Here is a link that explains the relationship between the Clearinghouse and student drivers: https://clearinghouse.fmcsa.dot.gov/Resource/Index/User-Roles-Student-Driver-Training-Provider
 
By reading the top section on this webpage (“If enrolled in an INDEPENDENT CDL training program”, you see that a student driver is responsible for meeting the requirement, just as if he were an owner/operator. The student must register on the Clearinghouse, and must also sign up with a C/TPA. The student will have to purchase a Query Plan, and turn that Query Plan over to the C/TPA so the C/TPA can conduct queries on him. The C/TPA will have to query the student, to be sure that he doesn’t already have a violation history. If there are no open violations on the student’s Clearinghouse dashboard, the C/TPA can then order a pre-employment test that will permit him to be in the driving school.
 
The driving school will need to purchase a Query Plan. They can then query the student to see if the student has an open violation. If his record is clear, the school can admit him.
 
When the student completes the driving school program, and obtains his CDL, he will have to update his record on the Clearinghouse. Here is a link to the page on the Clearinghouse that instructs a student about updating his record to a CDL driver status, by the simple action of clicking “Update Role to Driver.” https://clearinghouse.fmcsa.dot.gov/Resource/Index/Update-Student-Driver-Role
 
WOW! This ruling was decided in 2019. And who knew? Not I, for one. Probably not all driving schools, and probably also not all C/TPAs. These pages on the Clearinghouse have a date of 2021, so I’m guessing it took a while for the Clearinghouse to get this figured out as well. But why didn’t they tell us?!
 
But now we know. And we can move forward from here.