Academy offers simulator-based driver education and teen safety programs that Florida districts can evaluate, trial and deploy. We are based in Tampa and can serve districts statewide.
Every Florida district has the same structural constraint. Behind-the-wheel instruction needs a car, a certified instructor and a road, and those three things cap how many students can be trained no matter how much a district wants to train more.
A simulator does not remove that constraint, and anyone claiming otherwise is overselling. What it does is add capacity for the parts of driver education that do not require a public road, and let students experience hazards that cannot be staged safely at all.
Please note: Academy Sim Racing does not currently have simulators installed in Florida school districts. The programs described here are services Academy offers and can deploy. Any reference to a district on this site describes an area we can serve, not an existing installation or partnership.
What Academy is, and is not. Academy Sim Racing supplies racing and driving simulators and runs staffed programs with them. We are not a licensed driving school and we do not employ state-certified driver education instructors. Nothing we provide counts toward Florida licensing requirements, the supervised driving hours a learner must complete, or any state-required driver education course. Districts should deliver those through their own certified staff or an appropriately licensed provider. What we offer is supplementary practice and hazard exposure alongside them.
These six are where we have written detail. We can serve any Florida district, with or without a page here.
Our home county, and the district with the most established program.
Where the district course is delivered online.
Where driver education runs as after-school and summer camps.
One of Florida’s largest districts by enrollment.
A mid-sized coastal district south of Tampa Bay.
A compact district with seven high schools.
Orange, Osceola, Seminole, Lake, Marion, Brevard and every other Florida district can be served from Tampa. They do not have dedicated pages yet, which is deliberate. We would rather write something genuinely specific about a district than publish the same page with the name changed.
If you are with a district not listed, get in touch. The answer is almost certainly yes.
If you fund driver education through the Dori Slosberg Act. s.318.1215 lets a county add $5 to civil traffic penalties to support driver education, and requires that programs receiving those funds devote at least 30 percent of student instruction time to behind-the-wheel training. Simulator time is not behind-the-wheel time and cannot count toward that 30 percent. We would rather say so now than have it surface during an audit.
Worth having straight when planning a program. Under Florida law a learner license is available from age 15, and a Class E license from 16 requires the learner license to have been held for at least 12 months and at least 50 hours of supervised driving, of which 10 must be at night. Sixteen year olds may not drive between 11pm and 6am, and seventeen year olds not between 1am and 5am, with exceptions for work or when accompanied by a licensed driver aged 21 or over.
Source: Florida Driver License Handbook and s.322.05. Confirm current requirements with FLHSMV rather than relying on this summary.
Tell us the district, the schools involved and rough student numbers. We will come back with options and costs.