Polk County Public Schools serves around 114,000 students across a large geographic area. At that scale, reaching a meaningful share of eligible students is a throughput question before it is anything else.
Polk County Public Schools is headquartered at 1915 S. Floral Ave in Bartow and serves approximately 114,000 students, making it one of the largest districts in Florida.
We could not confirm the current shape of the district’s driver education provision from public sources, so we are not going to characterize it. If you are with the district and can tell us what actually runs, that will make any conversation far more useful.
Source: district profile.
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.
Polk is large, geographically spread and centered on Lakeland and Bartow rather than a single urban core. For any program delivered across campuses, that spread is the defining practical fact.
A district of roughly 114,000 students has a scale problem before it has anything else. Whatever driver education provision exists, reaching a meaningful share of eligible students in a district that size is a throughput question.
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.