Nebraska Schools Permits For The Young
In most states, the legal age for obtaining a driving permit is 15 to 16. However, if you live in Nebraska, you may be eligible to start driving as soon as you hit your 14th birthday, provided you live in outside of a city with a population of 5,000. In order to do that, you would have to qualify for the school driving permit, which doesn’t have privileges of a full Nebraska drivers license, but would allow you to get to school and other extracurricular activities.
Right now, the state wants to widen the category of students who would qualify for the school driving permit, which causes quite a bit of a controversy. Under the current laws, teens first apply for a learner’s permit. Nebraska learners permit holders must be accompanied by a licensed driver at all times and are not allowed on the road on their own. After gaining some driving experience, the student can apply for the provisional operator’s permit that allows unsupervised driving, but still has passenger restrictions and curfew. The regular driver’s license may not be obtained until the students turns 18. Similar graduated driver’s license laws with compulsory drivers education classes and permit testing are utilized in other states and they have been shown to dramatically decrease the number of fatalities among teen drivers, so the new laws can be viewed as a huge setback.
