James Kittel gets ready to drive for Jim Frownfelter, a 37-year veteran of teaching driver’s ed for Lawrence Public Schools. Driver’s ed has now been taught in Lawrence for 50 years.

Ben Stewart taught driver’s education in Lawrence Public Schools in the 1950s and ’60s.

Jim Frownfelter goes over instructions with first-time drivers Taylor Kidder and James Kittel during a driver’s ed course at Free State High School, 4700 Overland Drive.

Ben Stewart wasn’t sure what he was getting into when he started teaching driver’s education at Central Junior High School in 1959.

“I was nervous,” says Stewart, who now is 88 years old. “My wife says it took me three years to get over my nerves and settle into it.”

It’s easy to understand why he was apprehensive. Driver’s ed had never been taught in Lawrence before. This rite of passage for teenagers began 50 years ago.

In fact, driver’s ed itself turns 75 this year. The first driver’s ed class ever was taught in 1934 at State High in State College, Pa., by Amos Neyhart, an industrial engineering professor at nearby Penn State University.

This year, 164 students are enrolled in driver’s ed in Lawrence. That’s down from the annual average of 275 because of a tuition increase necessitated by a cut in state funds. There are no subsidies for low-income students.

Lawrence Public Schools owns seven cars designated for driver’s ed and employs eight full-time teachers.

The course taught today isn’t a whole lot different from the one Stewart taught in 1959. It still consists of a semester’s worth of classroom time and some time behind the wheel with a trained instructor.

But there have been some significant changes over the years.

When Stewart was teaching, kids were required to put in six hours on the road. These days, the biggest change is that the on-road training is “outcomes-based” rather than time-based, says Patrick Kelly, who coordinates technical education for Lawrence Public Schools. To advance, students have to demonstrate an ability to properly carry out certain maneuvers.

Back in the day, Stewart also got to use a driving simulator.

“That was real effective,” he says, because it allowed students to experience more challenging situations, such as being cut off on a highway, without being endangered.

But the days of the simulators are long gone.

“They’re just too expensive to maintain,” says Brenda Soldani, a driver’s ed instructor.

They also stopped showing the old scare films like “Mechanized Death” and “Dice in a Box,” with gory images from crash scenes.

“Kids nowadays, it’s cool to them,” Soldani says

Stewart thinks it was a good idea to ditch those. But there’s one change he doesn’t think is for the better: Students no longer learn on standard transmissions. Stewart insisted on teaching the stick shift.

“I was one of the old school,” he says. “I made sure they got both (standard and automatic).”

He doesn’t think it’s a good idea to teach only automatic.

“I still think it would be important because you have a little better understanding of what is happening with the car,” he explains. “You don’t get that with an automatic.”

His students didn’t always like it. He once had two girls almost in tears when he told them they’d be training on stick shift.

“Oh, we’ll have fun,” he reassured them.

Sure enough, they did. They drove out clear south of town. The next time the girls had to go out, they requested the stick shift.

Stewart’s teaching philosophy was simple: “My objective was for them to get through 10 years without a major accident. Then they were kind of on their own.”

As far as he knows, he was successful. He’s not aware of any students of his getting into serious accidents.

“Every once in a while I’d run into one of them,” Stewart says, no pun intended. “They’d come up and say I still remember what you taught me.”

Soldani says she’s sometimes seen former students drive and later jokes with them, “I didn’t teach you that.”

But then again, sometimes she veers off the lesson plan herself.

“Sometimes I catch myself doing things I wouldn’t allow my students to do,” she says.

That’s why driver’s ed is important, Soldani adds.

“As adults, we go out and train our kids, but we forget those little things like defensive driving, scanning and proper hand positioning on the steering wheel,” she explains. “It gives students an opportunity to be out with a skilled instructor, doing all kinds of maneuvers and doing the right thing.”

Plus, she says, “Parents don’t have the chicken brake” — that extra brake pedal on the passenger side. “We do.”