Her hand wraps around the shifter. Her thumb squeezes in the button and Vanessa Eury puts the car in drive.

It's a big move for the teen, soon to be a junior at Butler Senior High School.

Eury got her driving permit a couple of months ago and has her eye on getting her license in November. She's one of many students in the county using the summer months to learn how to get from point A to point B much faster than by walking.

The first time Eury was in charge of a vehicle, her mother was beside her. Recently, she was with someone whose job it is to be much calmer: a driving instructor.

Many parents sign their teenagers up for driving lessons as a way to make sure they learn the skills necessary to pass the driving test and get a deduction on car insurance.

Eury was learning how to parallel park, a dreaded skill for many beginning drivers, from Richard Elias, a private instructor.

Elias keeps talking with her, not telling her what to do, but reassuring her that she knows what to do. He asks her to make the decisions, to trust her own judgment.

Eury lets off the brake while checking over her left shoulder and the car corners into the parking spot. She stops. She turns the wheel the opposite way, checks behind her, and lets the car glide parallel with the concrete curb in front of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation Driver's License Center in Butler Township.

"Am I too close?" she asks.

Elias opens his door. No, she's not too close. There's a little less than a foot of pavement between her tires and the curb.

Vanessa opens her door. None of her tires are touching the white line on the driver's side.

If this were a test, she would pass.

Not all students pass the driving test, Elias said. And he thinks that's a good sign that the state Department of Transportation is giving a test that has meaning.

But parallel parking alone won't earn teens their license. There's a road course as well. Elias took Eury on a practice drive the second half of her lesson.

On this portion, Elias tells her which direction to head in as she pulls out onto New Castle Road before heading into a residential area. He doesn't tell her what she's doing right or wrong, leaving the decisions up to her.

She loops around Duncan Drive and comes to a complete stop before pulling out into traffic onto New Castle Road again.

She's hesitant and cautious as she tries to judge the oncoming traffic. Finally, she sees an opening she can fit the sedan into and makes a right turn. Just then a car pulls out from a restaurant parking lot into her path. She puts on the brakes, easily avoiding an accident. And turns back into the parking lot.

No one in the car was ever in fear of their life and Eury showed some skill navigating the roads, but still Elias tells her that small mistakes would have led to failure on an actual test.

But, with her parents, she will have plenty of time to practice. The law requires 50 hours behind the wheel with a licensed driver older than 25.

Vanessa will get a brush-up lesson in November before she takes her test.

Patty Hudeck, 17, took her final brush-up one Thursday on the road with Scott Taylor, driving instructor at Knoch High School.

At first it was scary for her to get behind the wheel of the Ford Taurus and press the gas.

"I was the one controlling the vehicle," the Saxonburg teen said.

Parallel parking is the most difficult skill for her, so she put extra practice in before taking the test.

More than driving, she had to learn other skills like how to pump gas. And in the theory part of driver's education at Knoch High School, she learned how to change tires.

Transferring what she learned in Taylor's class to the road was difficult, Hudeck said.

"It was kind of hard to remember stuff on the road," she said. Making it more difficult is predicting other drivers' behavior. "Whenever you're really driving, other drivers don't use theory," she said.

At first she made some amateur mistakes driving. Once her mother asked her turn on the lights. She switched on the windshield wipers. "I turned on everything else before I got the lights," she said.

Taylor has taught Hudeck and hundreds of other students in the car and in the classroom.

Their experience ranges from having never turned the wheel to already having the license. Some students come to him with established bad habits like driving with one hand on the center of the steering wheel.

"Kids are watching their parents," he said. "They tell me a lot of stories about what their parents do."

Elias said the number one mistake of student drivers is driving like their parents. As adults become more comfortable with driving, they tend to speed up, make rounded turns and do things like stop in front of white lines at intersections, he said.

At Knoch, students have six three-hour sessions in his $160 classes. Each student drives for an hour of each of the six sessions, the other two hours they watch and listen to the other drivers.

In the sedan, he sits on the passenger side to guide the young driver out of the parking lot and to a three-point turn. On his side he has only a break pedal on the leased vehicle specially designed for driver's education. If necessary, he can reach across and drive with his left hand.

He begins the students on country roads to evaluate their abilities. Then he moves them to the highways, starting in the northern part of the county and moving to more congested areas like Cranberry Township. On the final day, he might take the students to Pittsburgh for some city driving.

Driving in Pittsburgh exposes the students to some environments and conditions — like red X lights over lanes — they won't see in Butler. In some cases, it also makes a blow to a student's confidence in driving.

Otherwise, "Some students think they are horrible when actually, they are average," Taylor said.

Most students are hesitant to hit the gas when they begin learning, Taylor said. "But, they get over the going slow thing pretty fast."

Instead, he works to make sure the students keep checking their blind spots.

The students take the classroom portion of driver's education in the school year. He teaches them about seat belt use, how to purchase insurance and vehicle maintenance.

Elias, Eury's private driving instructor, is also the director at Butler County Community College's driving program. He works in the business his father, Herb Elias, started using methods he said have worked with legally blind, deaf and mentally handicapped. He charges $35 per lesson.

"Our focus is to teach you to be a good driver long after you pass the test," he said.

"Driver's education works the same as music education. Practice. Complete each lesson and then move on."