Drive time

Standing in a parking lot on a steamy summer morning, Brian Jones waves his arms at a white sedan, circling his hands in a steady but emphatic pantomime intended for the teenager inside.

“Turn the wheel the other way,” he mouths.

It works. The car glides into the parking spot, sparing the battered orange cone that crumpled in the previous attempt.

Another day for Jones, another future ding prevented in parking lots throughout Lee County.

While school is out, hundreds of local teenagers are taking driver’s education as a summer class, honing their driving and parking skills and pining for the day they can walk out of the Division of Motor Vehicles with a sought-after license.

At Estero High School, Jones coaches two dozen kids on the basics and nuances of driving in Southwest Florida, where the traffic depends mostly on the weather and patience is the core skill he tries to instill in them.

Teenagers are more likely to die in car crashes than any other age group, according the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. The crash rate per mile driven for kids 16 to 19 years old is four times the risk for drivers 20 and older. And 16-year-olds are twice as likely to crash as 18- to 19-year-olds.

That’s one of the reasons summer driving class is the only enrichment course Lee County high schools offer during the summer outside basic course credit recovery.

It wouldn’t be possible without a state law adopted in 2002 to fund driver education in Florida. The Dori Slosberg Driver Education Safety Act, named for a state representative’s daughter killed in a car crash, allows counties to put a $3 surcharge on traffic tickets to pay for the classes. Lee County chose to do so, so all of its high schools offer summer driver’s ed this year, including South Fort Myers High, which opened last August.

Parents and students like the course, which often nets teens discounted insurance and, they say, cuts down on high-stress driving lessons.

Jordan Tarquino, 15, logs lots of driving time with her parents and can’t wait to get her license in September. But she admits she likes driver’s ed better when she’s at school.

“Coach Jones is pretty calm. My parents are pretty critical,” she said, which can lead to some heated moments.

It’s true: After teaching driver’s education on and off for 24 years, Jones is hard to ruffle.

So this week, he doesn’t sweat the car’s missing hubcap — a student knocked it off after accidentally hitting a curb during practice, he shrugs. And he smiles when he recalls the wackiest moment in a car with teenagers, which happened during a driver’s ed class at Mariner High School.

“We were in the north part of Cape Coral. We came out of a subdivision, and the police pulled us over, thinking we’d robbed a house. We had to get out of the car with our hands up. The poor kid (driving) was scared to death,” Jones said.

The officers — in two squad cars and a motorcycle and using a bullhorn to direct Jones and the driving students — had been searching for a blue car. They quickly realized it was a case of mistaken identity, he said.

Jones has only had one real accident — a student side-swiped another car while driving — but doesn’t overdo it on the teacher’s brake. He keeps his comments minimal. And unlike many anxious parents, he doesn’t constantly clutch the door handle.

While many of his charges have lessons with their parents, they all agree on one thing: Everyone prefers to drive with Jones.

“Sometimes for the parents it’s a little too emotional,” he said.

Such is the case for Megan Murlau, 17, whose mother was in a bad car accident. It’s hard for her to teach without feeling overly anxious, Megan said.

“She reminds me that Coach Jones has a brake on his side and she doesn’t,” she said.