Best School in Florida?

Cypress hauls plenty of drywall and many times you have to take off early on Sunday, at least by noon. All in all, you could do a lot worse than Cypress. It's not a horrible company as fortycalglock said, it usually gets you home on weekends.

 

May trucking out of Pensacola. No flat bed. Dry and refer.

 

I can't give you any info about the Roadmaster School in Tampa but I did just graduate from the Jacksonville, FL school yesterday. I can say without a doubt that I would not recommend the Jacksonville school to anybody. That school is having a bunch of problems lately. A new Director of Training (#2 Man at the school) recently took over and he's a complete idiot. He's run off most of the good instructors already and is replacing them with idiots and his family members. He's very impressed with himself and his new-found authority and it's making life difficult for everybody.

On their practice pad, there will be 4 trucks running at any one time with 20+ students rotating through. In the last month I never saw more than 2 instructors on the pad at a time and 80% of the time there was only one. Hell, some of the time there were no instructors on the pad for an hour or more. The instructors aren't doing much teaching, just the senior students showing the junior students how they were shown when they first got there.

One other thing to be prepared for is the "adjustment in financing" or whatever they are calling it. Basically, towards the end of week 2 everybody gets called in and told that their credit score determined that they wouldn't be allowed to finance the original amount of the tuition agreed upon and they would have to come up with another $400-$1500 before they could graduate. Yes, I was called in and told the same thing which was odd since my entire tuition was paid by the VA (GI Bill) and they backed off their demand in a hurry when I pointed that out to them. In other words, they're not even running credit scores or anything, just bluffing students into coughing up more money.

There are a few trainers left that do care and are good at what they do but they are completely overwhelmed with the number of students attending. My class originally started with 16 people...it was a night class so it wasn't filled to the max capacity of 25 like the days/weekend classes are...and we managed to graduate a whopping total of 2 people on our graduation date. Several others are still trying and will be retesting again sometime in the future but that's still pretty dismal performance for a "CDL Mill."

No, my posting this is not "Sour Grapes" on my part as I didn't have to pay a penny for my school due to the GI Bill and I did pass my tests the first time and graduated on schedule. The other guy who passed and I both had previous truck driving experience from the military. Not a single person who was new to a big rig passed their tests.

 

I completed the PTEC training. I rate it excellent. Plenty of backing, 90 degrees, parallel, offset and range driving for shifting. Each student also has to complete 1000 mile road driving. Its a 320 hour course just slightly over 2000 dollars. I had been out of driving 10years. Before that I had right at 15 years. I'm still considered a rookie!