InTucker Magazine

Business of the Month – Taggart’s Driving School

One of the longest running businesses in Tucker is one you’ve likely driven by thousands of times. In fact, it may be where you learned to drive in the first place.

“Tucker made sense,” Schrenk recalls. “They looked at 285….Where do you park the cars? Where is someplace easy to get for the population? In Tucker, we were able to acquire land for a driving range, and we had lower rents.”

The unmistakable, big yellow sign for Taggart’s Driving School sits along the property’s frontage on Lawrenceville Highway, the site that Taggart’s has occupied since 1973. It was just a year later that a young Barry Schrenk moved from New Jersey to Georgia and began operating Taggart’s, then a national brand.

Now with locations in Tucker, East Cobb and Dunwoody, Schrenk has made Taggart’s his life’s work. He operates out of an office in the Tucker headquarters, overseeing 20 employees. The majority of the work for those employees, he says, involves working with young drivers.

“Parents are not driving teachers,” Schrenk asserts. “Sometimes I wonder how parents do it. One of the mistakes parents make is they have no control of the car. All they can do is scream. We have two steering wheels, two brakes and two gas pedals in all of our cars.”

In Georgia, drivers under 18 must take a driver’s education program with 30 hours of classroom or online instruction and a minimum of six hours of in-car instruction. Taggart’s does all of that and more, also offering adult driving lessons and defensive driving courses.

“Most of our students are teens in the Driver’s Ed program,” Schrenk explains. “Parents tell me they see such a difference in how their child handles the car after the kid has gone through our training program.”

And as for why Taggart’s has lasted a half-century here in Tucker? Schrenk says that is personal.

“I live in Tucker. I’m 1.3 miles from my house,” he says with a laugh, adding, “I don’t have any desire to move the business.”

Taggart’s Driving School is located at 3566 Lawrenceville Highway. They are online at taggartsdrivingschool.com.