About Us

Lois and Steve Lents

We are Lois and Steve Lents, and we established Pacific Driver Education in Portland, Oregon, in 2010. Since then, we have taught thousands of lessons, classroom sessions, comprehensive traffic safety education courses for teens and adults, continuing education training for drivers of fleet vehicles, and presented seminars for other driving instructors. Our students have come from every continent on earth – except for Antarctica - and dozens of countries worldwide.

As a family-owned and operated business, we are committed to providing a great learning environment for our customers. And as parents and now grandparents, we feel an even stronger commitment to share our knowledge of how to stay safe on today's roadways. We enjoyed steady growth for the first ten years in business, each year reaching more students than the previous one.

From Pandemic Problems to an "Essentials" Breakthrough

But like so many others, our business took an unexpected turn in 2020 with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. By April, our state government closed schools and most businesses. Many companies and all public schools closed for over 18 months. At that time, more than 200 students had registered for our spring and summer Driver Education classes, and we were not allowed to meet with them in a classroom. Many driving schools in Oregon closed their doors right in the middle of a term of classes and never reopened. We were determined to weather the pandemic and continue to provide driver training.

For some time, we had been considering how to reach even more students and had tinkered with the idea of providing a self-paced, online course that teens or adults could complete on their own time. It became apparent that our only hope of surviving as a company was to do that very thing – and to do it quickly. So, we rolled up our sleeves, pulled in our son, Matthew, who is also a certified driving instructor, set up recording studios, began editing video, and were able to create version 1 of the online class we now call Driver Essentials Online.

Every one of our students stayed with us through the spring and summer as we explored this new type of driver training. By June 2020, we fitted our cars with HEPA air filters, wore masks, kept car windows cracked open while driving, and stocked up on alcohol wipes to sanitize the vehicles. With these precautions in place, we resumed teaching in-car lessons in late June 2020.

Students and Parents Showed Us the Way Forward

We knew we were on to something special as students came to their in-car driving lessons with a recall of what they learned in the course. Some of them had even gone through the online work with their parents. One family in particular stands out from those "pandemic-era" learners. John came to his first lesson with Lois. As always, she drove to the parking lot we use for beginning students. Along the way, she asked John a few questions about the material he had completed from Driver Essentials. It was a pleasant surprise that he remembered the basic concepts of targeting, reference points, and when to straighten the wheel to come out of a turn. Students in a traditional classroom course often need help remembering these essential basics. But the best surprise was that when John moved to the driver's seat, he completed the pre-drive checklist and correctly performed every skill with minimal coaching. Yet he also said he had only been behind the wheel for about two hours with his parents. As it turned out, John's mom went through the online lessons right along with him, and then they went out and practiced those skills together. He did a remarkable job on that first lesson and each successive one. John's mom told us how happy they felt with the quality of the material we taught and that she felt the process of helping her son learn also helped her polish up her driving skills.

Then there was Marissa. She was another terrific 2020 Driver Essentials Online student. She had a fantastic recall of concepts she was learning - and felt that the ability to go back and listen to an idea or lesson over again was a real advantage for her. Meanwhile, Marissa's dad wanted to be sure that he was reinforcing the things she learned, so he attended each of her driving lessons, quietly riding along in the back seat. Marissa excelled in every way and scored in the high 90s on her final drive exam.

You can imagine how excited we were when August came around, and we reviewed all of the students' results. The three of us sent up a cheer as we realized that each student had completed the Driver Essentials Online course, taken a DMV exam, and become a licensed driver.

Quality Online Learning is Here to Stay

The past three years have shown us that online, self-paced, interactive training is a great way to teach traffic laws and the rules of the road, learn the steps to complicated driving maneuvers like parking, lane changes, and learn proper ways to respond to difficult traffic situations. In that time, more than 1700 Oregon new drivers have learned those concepts through our course we call Driver Essentials Online.

If you research online learning, you will learn that one of the drawbacks is low student engagement. And that is undoubtedly true of Zoom-based lecture courses. However, lack of engagement with the course is not a frequent issue with Driver Essentials Online.

Here's why:

• Most students are highly motivated to learn to drive
• The lessons are short, running about 8 minutes each
• Lessons are primarily video-driven
• real-life driver situations, so staying involved is easy

The success of this program in our home state of Oregon made us realize we needed to make the program available to students who live in other states because the principles of safe driving are the same in every state.

Our family wants you to feel good about your decision for your student's knowledge of safe driving. We hope you join us as you prepare to get on the road!