Ramstad: Lawmakers should fund drivers ed for all Minnesota teens

There are many virtues to growing up in small towns. One is that every kid learns to drive.

That used to be true across Minnesota. But in the 1980s, when the federal government stopped tying the distribution of highway construction funds to drivers education, the state stopped requiring school districts to provide it.

In the fall of 1992, the Star Tribune reported that only half of Minnesota kids learned to drive in schools, down from over 90% in 1972.

Today, you can still learn to drive if you go to high school in a small town. But if you're in the metro area, you can take a class for the written exam, but you need to spend upwards of $500 with a driving school to actually get behind the wheel.

As a result, many kids wait to get a license after age 18 when they can attempt to pass the test without a class. And many don't work until then, either.

Equality of opportunity is eroded, and a drag on the economy created.

The Minnesota Legislature is trying to do many things this year, chief among them spending a $17 billion budget surplus. That's a 30% windfall against the state's two-year budget of around $50 billion.

But Walz and policymakers are also contending with something never seen in Minnesota's history: a shrinking workforce.

He has several ideas for trying to get more people out of their homes and into a job of some kind. The most substantive is a tax break to cover some child care costs for families making up to $200,000 a year. The break is $4,000 per child but limited to $10,500 per family.

For teenagers, Walz's budget proposes doubling the spending on a program called Youth at Work. The new spending is relatively small, about $2 million.

Far more interesting to me is an effort by lawmakers to teach more teens to drive. Rep. Ruth Richardson, a Democrat from Eagan, has tried for several sessions to draw attention to the disparity between kids who can afford the behind-the-wheel training and those who can't.

When I first talked to her about it last fall, she told me, "Research tells us having a drivers license is a greater predictor of full-time employment than a high school diploma is."

Safety is also a consideration. In 2021, the latest year for which data is available, teenagers age 15 to 19 represented 9% of the state's drivers but were involved in 18% of crashes.

In 2019, Richardson picked up as one of her co-sponsors Rep. Hodan Hassan, a Democrat who had just been elected from District 62B in Minneapolis the previous fall. At the time, Hassan's teenage son was learning to drive.

"I was telling her I cannot believe how much money it was," Hassan recalled to me last week.

This year, Richardson asked Hassan to take the lead in a bill to subsidize some drivers training for teenagers.

The Democratic-led House and Senate have already spent considerable time on a drivers-license-for-all measure that would allow unauthorized immigrants to get a license. That effort has also been years in the making.

Hassan grew up in a family of nine children. When she was a teenager in Minneapolis schools 20 years ago, her parents couldn't afford the behind-the-wheel instruction provided by driving schools. She eventually learned to drive from her older brothers.

"If we pass this bill, it may allow more young people to join the workforce, people who can't right now because transportation is a barrier," Hassan said.

That should be music to the ears of employers, particularly businesses that rely on teens for part-time help.

There's a chance, of course, that driving schools will try to gobble up any subsidy by raising prices.

And Hassan has one more curve to navigate. Her proposed subsidy is based on whether students qualify for reduced-price or free school lunches. But her party is trying to make all school lunches free.