MOSES LAKE — Driving instructors have tough jobs, even in the best of times.

For many parents and students, driver’s education is simply a box to check on the way to getting a driver’s license early, or perhaps to save a little money on their auto insurance.

Not so for Kenn Bishop, whose family owns and operates Cruisers Driving Academy. For Bishop, the handful of hours that his students spend in his classroom or behind the wheel of one of his vehicles, less time than is spent in a single week of full-time work, is an underappreciated matter of no less than life or death.

In 2018, the leading cause of death for people 15 to 19 years old was unintentional accidents, of which the largest contributor was automobile accidents, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The human life cost of unsafe driving is personal for Bishop, who has at least one friend who lost their child to a car accident, as well as a small number of former students who didn’t take their courses seriously, flunked out of driver’s ed and later died behind the wheel. So when students are engaged with Bishop’s courses, he feels deeply that their lives might later be saved.

There have always been problems with accomplishing that mission, Bishop added. But then, in March, the pandemic hit. For a number of days, driver’s education was included in the list of “essential businesses,” considered vital to the functioning of society and allowed to remain open. But then, as suddenly as the first round of closures came, driver’s education was removed from that list days later, Bishop said.

The financial blow of the closure was substantial. The state began closing businesses in March, and driver’s education schools were barred from opening their doors to in-person education until the beginning of June, Bishop said. By the time classes started again, his family had gone the better part of three months without any income from their businesses, and all the while they were required to keep paying rent, insurance and maintenance.

Cruisers has operated locally for more than a decade. Bishop’s wife, Sherry, had been looking for a job to pay for a new car and applied for a position with Quality Driving, the driving school that used to occupy the building where Cruisers is today. A little over 10 years ago, the owners, planning to move out of Moses Lake, offered to sell the school. A new sign went up over their door, and Cruisers Driving Academy opened for business.

In the proceeding years, the school has expanded, with brick-and-mortar offices now in Moses Lake, Ephrata, Othello and Ellensburg, as well as three satellite schools within the high schools in Odessa, Ritzville and Royal City. While the expansions have been a positive sign of a successful business, it also meant a lot of fixed costs that weren’t being covered during the pandemic.

But while those costs mounted, Bishop’s priority remained the safety of his students.

That’s why, while some other driving schools made the switch to online driver’s ed courses when their offices were closed in March, Bishop refused, saying it would compromise the quality of the education and the safety of his students.

“We probably could have made a lot of money doing that,” Bishop said. “I just couldn’t do it. Yes, I need to make money, I have a family and I have house payments ... but I couldn’t do it. It’s hard enough to get them to pay attention when they’re right in front of you – you’re not going to reach them if they’re in their rooms.”

And while Bishop suspects that many of the students that couldn’t take his classes during the closure opted instead for those online classes, business has begun to return to some level of normalcy. During an interview with the Herald, students trickled in throughout the day, requesting written or driving tests.

There are certainly some things that remain changed by the pandemic. Bishop, who deals with chronic bronchitis, struggles to breathe through his mask, one of the hundreds that he and his wife made to sell while they waited for the driving school to reopen. Even on a rainy day, Bishop asks Zachary Shortridge, the student taking his driving test, to roll down the car windows, a state requirement to get some airflow inside the vehicle.

But the restrictions, and the closure, haven’t stopped Cruisers from operating.

Emry Dinman can be reached via email at edinman@columbiabasinherald.com.