Dalys Truck Driving School No truth in advertising, bad cirriculum, improper drug testing. faulty equiptment bad buisness practices. Buford, Georgia
Trucking is suppose to be done legally within the hours the govt has specified. The companies that Dalys sets up perspective drivers with rarely adhere to govt policies. Most of them want the drivers to leave and stay away from home immediately after obtaining a CDL for six weeks. Dalys recruiters when promising a job do not mention this. As far as the hours go, the state is suppose to require the students to be taught 172 hours. I do not know how this school has been able to justify these hours. The first week is spent in a clasroom basically reading the Georgia state CDL manuel.
On Friday at noon the students are released and sent to the DMV for testing. The travel time there and the testing time is counted tward the school total even though the school is not participating in any of it. Start of your day on the second week you are given a peice of paper with a script to memorize to present yourself and your knowledge of the truck to an examiner at the testing site. One hour into your self instruction, things are called to a halt and "driving" begins.
In groups of four students, one student drives for fifteen minutes and sits for forty five minutes out of the hour watching other students try to park the truck. At the end of a forty five hour week you have driven ten hours and set under a tent for thirty and did self instruction for five. The third week is structured in a similiar way. In the morning or afternoon a group of four people go on the road. The instructor allows you to drive for about an hour and sit in the truck bed for three hours.
Depending on what group you are in (morning road or afternoon road) You then spend the other part of the day back sitting for forty five minutes. The following week you test? How is this 172 hours? Half of the class is being paid for by tax money and yet the government does not make sure the school gives the hours of instruction. Upon enrollment, you are told that you will make $38k a year. The trucking companies pay new drivers about 32 cents a mile. If you drove 500 miles a day five days a week fifty weeks a year.
You barely make this. Often the trucking companies do not have loads, the truck breaks down, or you run out of hours of service before you drive the 500 miles causing you to drive illegally or not get the miles. None of this is mentioned by the trucking school recruiters. Neither is the fact that the reason they are so nice and so sweet to the students isnt because they care, its because when you get hired, even if the job is for one day, that is when they get the government money.
When you stick it out with a trucking company for a year the trucking company actually gives Dalys a kickback instead of paying the driver who has done all the work a bonus. How right is that? So if you want to become a trucker. Know a few of the facts. Sleeping in a truck sucks. Your family is home and you are stuck in Idaho. The pay sucks. The school gets rich off of your ignorance of the facts. I hope this helped educate someone into not wasting their time and money.
1 Updates & Rebuttals
Ryan
Buford,Georgia,
Reading and Understanding your Choices
#2REBUTTAL Owner of company
Tue, May 07, 2013
Daly's Truck Driving School has been Training Drivers in the Atlanta Area since 1992. We have graduated and Licensed over 10,000 people since that start date. Our business is to facilitate employment for entry level drivers into the driving industry.
Unfortunatley, It is impossible to make everyone completley happy when your dealing with that many people. I will try to clarify some of this complaint and in doing so will agree with most of what is being said but also state the facts about the misunderstanding that this particular student had with the process.
The companies that hire Daly's Truck Driving School Students are mainly large corportations and include the top 10 size companies in the USA. We work regularly with about 20 companies but our students have no obligation to go to any of the companies we work with but rather can choose to go anywhere they want. We simply allow companies to come in at lunch time bring pizza and if the student wants to hear what the company has to offer they can sit in and listen.
If they are not interested they have no obligation to apply for a job with that company. These are recruiters for companies not Daly's recruiters. We do not accept any kick back from any of these companies and short of having the companies speak to the students over lunch we have no additional relationship with the company. We simply create the employment opportunity for the student and then get out of the way of their individual decision as to where the go to work.
Daly's Truck Driving School is licensed and monitored by the Georgia Department of Driver Services. Our curriculum is 172.8 hour as defined in our syllabus. This is exactly what the State is monitoring. They check every student we train to ensure that this hours requirement is met. Our program is 17 days which breaks down to roughly 10 hours a day. Two of these days are test days at the state one is for the permit and one is for the road test. This is explained in detail in the syllabus and catalogue we hand out on day one to every student.
The entry level driving requirement for CDL driver Training as mandated by the Federal Government is 160 hours currently. Our program meets and exceeds these requirements. This is why companies hire our students if we did not meet this mandate they would not.
Daly's uses a 4 to 1 ratio in training this is much lower ratio then most schools. Some of our competition goes as high as 8 to 1 ratios in training. This does in fact result in 15 minutes of each hour where you are actually driving the truck. If you choose to then not observe your classmates doing the manuevers that is a mistake. You can learn a lot from watching someone else making a mistake or doing a maneuver correctly. So if it is the opinion of this student that training should be longer I would suggest he advocate with the federal govt. to increase this entry level driving requirement to include more hours. But the truth is we are simply helping to get the minimum requirements to get you to go to work for a company.
During school we cover the whistle blower protection act which tells a student who to contact and what to do if your company tries to get you to drive illegally. This is not something you have to do and there are hotlines that are in place to stop this from happening.
This complaint should serve as a good warning. Trucking is a difficult job and industry and is an unconventional job choice. The hours are long and the away time is difficult but there are almost no other jobs you can get into that in 17 days of training you can be making 38-40 k your first year. Yes according to the American Trucking Association first year drivers make between 38- 40 k thier first year driving over the road. Your average mileage is between 2800 and 3000 miles a week. Pay rate is average .30 cents a mile.
I advise any person to research this industry before you get into it. If you have family issues and they won't understand the required time away and more importantly you can't handle this I would recommend rethinking this career. But if you can make it thru a year and get that under your belt the local jobs become available and your options really open up. The average pay go up to 50 k a year and you have a choice to stay over the road or come back to a local more conventional job.
www.dtruckschool.com our website can help answer any other questions about government grants to pay for your schooling. If this is something your interested let us help you get into a new career.
Thanks,
Ryan Daly
Daly's Truck Driving School