Letters to the Editor: School Crisis

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The reason for this letter is to let you know how disappointed I am after reading your article on truck schools and the difficult funding problems they are having. I spent about 15 minutes on the phone with your reporter to give you information and you had to twist it to make me sound like we have no idea what we are doing.

"The part of the article that says, “Right now, we are depending on drivers cut from other trucking companies” is so far from the truth. Arrow has some of the strictest hiring guidelines in the industry; we don’t accept cuts from other trucking companies. That is a terrible misuse of a word.

When we were accepting students from schools, I would go to a school and the director would tell the students, “If you fill out an Arrow application and they approve you, then any other company will hire you.” That is not the comment about a company that takes cuts from others.

We have stringent hiring guidelines and under no circumstance do we compromise them. What was said was, with trucking companies that are going out of business from no fault of the drivers, there are a lot of qualified drivers to choose from.

Nick Tramel

I>Director of Recruiting

rrow Trucking Co.

ulsa, Okla.

tories like the driver school funding crisis amuse me. The bureaucrats can’t figure it out. With 15 years in this business as a driver, manager and 11-year owner of my own truck lines, I can say the problem is that all the “good guys” weren’t making a respectable living anymore. Truck drivers are born and bred, not taught in school. The old hands got out when they saw their pay checks dwindle down to nothing and spent endless nights out on the road, being laid over.

Want to fix the problem? Pay the experienced driver what he is worth.

J. Richard Benfield

i>President

am Transport Inc.

irginia Beach, Va.

These letters appeared in the April 22 print edition of Transport Topics. Subscribe today.