Iowa Department of Education

Iowa Code section 321.178 provides that "every public school district in Iowa shall offer or make available to all students residing in the school district or Iowa students attending a nonpublic school in the district an approved course in driver education."  More districts are looking into contracting with a private provider to provide driver education to their students. 

One issue that arises is how to deal with students who are eligible for full or partial waiver of the fee for the course. 

A district is obliged to honor the waiver, even if the district uses a private provider as the means by which the course is offered to students. However, the private provider cannot be expected to receive no payment or reduced payment for waiver-eligible students. And, of course, the private provider cannot know the identity of free/reduced eligible students.

One way to avoid any potential problems is illustrated by the following hypothetical example: The contract between the district and the private provider states that the district shall pay to the provider a lump sum of money to provide driver education to no more than "x" number of students. The district computes how much it would charge to provide the course directly, taking into account the percentage of free/reduced students. For example, if the district knows it usually has 50 students sign up for driver education, 20% of whom are eligible for waiver of the fee, it contracts with the provider to pay to the provider whatever that lump sum is. The individual students then pay their fee to the district because the district knows how much of the fee it may charge to whom. This also relieves the provider of the headache of chasing down students who are late in paying for the course.

The "disadvantage" of having the district remain responsible for collecting the payments from students is self-evident. But bear in mind that the only way the provider is allowed to know which students get the course for free or reduced payment is to have the parents of those students provide written consent to the school to release the identity of the student to the provider.