The School District of Manatee County has approximately seven traditional high schools, which makes full district coverage a realistic piece of work rather than an open-ended commitment.
The School District of Manatee County is headquartered at 215 Manatee Ave. W in Bradenton. The district’s published fast facts give a projected 2024 to 2025 enrollment of approximately 53,416 students across traditional, charter, home-school and PEP students, and approximately seven traditional high schools.
We could not confirm the current shape of the district’s driver education provision from public sources.
Source: district fast facts.
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.
Seven high schools is a genuinely workable number. It is small enough that a rotating program can reach every campus in a manageable schedule, and large enough that the reach is meaningful.
That is a different proposition from Hillsborough, where 1,266 square miles makes full coverage a logistics exercise, or Polk, where the scale itself is the constraint.
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.
We bring simulators to a campus, run sessions through the day and remove everything afterwards. The simplest way for a district to trial the format.
Equipment on site for a defined period, such as a semester or a safety initiative, supported by our staff.
Where a district wants a permanent capability, that is a conversation rather than a catalog item. We are happy to have it.
Tell us the schools involved, rough student numbers and your timeframe. We will send program options and costs.