Students in Northeastern High School’s CDL prep class test drive a simulator. (Image Courtesy of Chad Forry/Northeastern High School)A school in York County, Pennsylvania, recently raised $115,000 for a new truck driving simulator for its CDL training class.
Northeastern High School and the Pennsylvania Motor Truck Association York and Adams Chapters began fundraising for the simulator Sept. 12, 2018. They reached their goal of $115,000 on March 15. The simulator will be purchased and delivered before the start of the Fall 2019 semester.
Northeastern High School began offering its CDL prep class in 2017 and the class had nearly doubled in size by 2018. Chad Forry, the program’s instructor and a teacher of over 20 years, came up with the idea for the class as a way to provide students with a marketable skill. The high school is located near several main transportation routes in Central Pennsylvania, including I-83, I-76, and I-81, which brings a demand for trucking jobs to the area.
“After 20 years, at some point, you’d like to do things differently and I just thought this would be a great opportunity because you always hear about the demand (for truckers) and the opportunities of sign-on bonuses and all this stuff that’s happening. I really didn’t see anybody actually targeting this need at all in the area,” Forry said.
