Monitors Keep Traffic Schools in Line

Comedy traffic school instructor Earl Boretz wanted to liven up his class one recent evening. So he attempted to leaven the facts with humor.

Say you’re driving below the speed limit on winding Topanga Canyon Road, he told his 18 students. If a trail of cars behind you grows to five, you’re legally required to pull over and let them pass. But how, Boretz concluded, can anyone see five cars behind them on that twisting road?

A handful of the casually dressed students chuckled. Some slouched or propped their feet up on the next chair. Many munched on goodies.

Seated upright in the Marina del Rey classroom was 31-year-old Zsa Zsa Scott, dressed in a black suit. Rather than Kit Kat bars, she was armed with a note pad. And she was furiously scribbling in the pages.

Scott was attentive because she’s paid to be--unlike the students who forked over $27 to attend class to expunge a violation from their driving record.

Scott is one of seven part-time employees of Los Angeles County’s Traffic Violator School Monitoring program. The inspectors examine the curriculum and teaching environment at 874 traffic school locations--where authorities say a majority of the 1.6 million traffic citations issued annually in the county are disposed of rather than in courtroom hearings.

Why monitor these schools? “They are much more aware of what they’re supposed to do when they know they are held accountable,” said Scott, a bank manager by day.

Scott is paid about $11 an hour for her part-time evening and weekend assignments. Most weeks, she works a minimum of 20 hours.

On a typical assignment, she pretends she is a potential student and calls a school to make sure an operator is standing by to answer questions between the state Department of Motor Vehicles-mandated hours of 8:30 a.m. and 4 p.m.

Then she shows up to class without warning to inspect it for at least four hours, notifying only the instructor who she is. Among the 18 criteria Scott monitors are whether the classroom is easy to find and if the instructor is really instructing.

The DMV, for example, wants no more than 80 minutes of video shown to students during any eight-hour period. Instructors must cover 16 topics, ranging from driving in hazardous conditions to road rage.

The inspection process is subjective, said Carlos Morales Jr., the county program’s director.

“If they stay strictly to the checklist,” he said, “geez, that’s kind of mechanical and they can miss stuff.”

For instance, monitors have caught students reading newspapers, listening to music on earphones and dozing off in class--all no-nos that aren’t on the 18-item checklist. On the other hand, the monitors do not have to rate whether instructors such as Boretz, who works for a firm called the Comedy School, are funny.

The DMV requires reviews of each school location every 90 days. But that doesn’t happen, Morales says, in large part because there isn’t enough money to hire more than seven monitors.

The job of a traffic school monitor isn’t all that odd, considering there are also government monitors of mattresses, pillows and potatoes, not to mention trash inspectors. But what is odd about the traffic school monitoring program is that it’s run by the county Housing Authority.

In 1996, municipal courts terminated inspection agreements with a contractor, the California Traffic Safety Institute. The Board of Supervisors then instructed the chief administrative officer to find a department that could take on the job. The Housing Authority volunteered, believing the program would be beneficial if it could provide training and job opportunities for public housing tenants as well as for other applicants such as Scott.

The Los Angeles Superior Court sets aside money from each traffic ticket to fund the program. In 2000, the cost of monitoring was $580,000.

When the Housing Authority took over, only 2% of the schools in Los Angeles County were in full compliance with the DMV’s regulations. Four years later, more than 50% met the standards.

Kyle Christopherson, spokesman for the Los Angeles Superior Court, attributes much of that improvement to the program. “We have the finest monitoring agency in the state now,” he said.

However, the program’s effectiveness remains somewhat in question in certain areas.

Besides attending many comedy schools and such specialty instructions as the Gay Community Traffic School, Scott also has been to ones taught in Spanish, Korean and Japanese.

“These are very difficult to sit through for hours,” concedes Scott, who does not speak those languages. “They are kind of excruciating.”

Scott must attend classes where she doesn’t understand a single word because of the limited availability of monitors who speak foreign languages. Only two county monitors are fluent in Spanish and one in Chinese. None speaks Korean or Japanese or any of the other languages traffic courses use in Los Angeles County: Armenian, Khmer, French, German, Italian, Persian and Russian.

In situations where she doesn’t comprehend the curriculum, she spends her time checking on, among other things, handicapped access, the size of the rooms and whether instructor and school operator licenses are posted.

Scott sympathizes with traffic school students.

“Sometimes it’s even hard for me to stay awake,” confides Scott, who hopes to get a full-time administration position with the program. “Sometimes the instructors are boring. Of course, I would never tell them that.”

Student Larry Leker appreciates what Scott is doing.

“It’s a good idea,” said Leker, who describes himself as an impatient driver trying to be less irritated on the road. “It makes the teacher and the students more conscious. [Traffic law] is a serious issue. It’s not playtime. You’re there for a good reason.”