california post certification issues for off road EVOC

  Our off road EVOC courses were previously POST certified, but due to unrealistic and unreasonable demands from California POST, we have decided to no longer seek POST certification.  For example, POST wants all vehicles coming to off road training to be outfitted for high-speed performance and pursuit driving: roll cages, 5-point harnesses, and helmets for the students. This is obviously impractical and unnecessary since speeds in our classes are under 20 mph.  We do not do high speed or pursuit driving in any of our courses. We will still assist POST agencies attending our train-the-trainer course with templates for the paperwork required to certify your courses, but it will depend on your area representative if your in-house course gets certified. Each area representative has their own set of rules. There is no POST rule about where you attend your train-the-trainer course. You just list your instructor training on your resume. It may be possible to POST certify your in-house off road course in your region if you meet the personal requirements of your area representative. Our courses used to be certified, but when the POST representative from our region moved, the new person had their own rules. We could not meet these new rules since it is not practical to outfit a Jeep for high speed performance driving, and it is obviously impossible to equip a firefighting rig weighing 35,000 pounds for pursuit driving.

There is currently a phenomenal POST area representative for the region who has graciously offered to certify the classes.  We must go through South Bay Regional Public Safety Consortium,  to do this since POST does not directly certify private training providers.  This requires that we spend class time registering each student through an online portal.  We have no internet access in the off road areas we use, so spending time trying to get this done is not practical at this time.  Also, if POST representative changes again, the rules may change again and we could get decertified again.  For these reasons, we are not pursuing this at this time.