As a female truck driver and commercial license examiner, Mesha Sanders has heard the words, “you can’t,” more times than she can count over the past decade. But as of this year, she has shown that she can. Sanders owns her own trucking academy.
“It’s just the world we live in,” Sanders said. “In most people’s eyes, women are just here to have a family, have kids, be a mother, have a desk job, do something easy. Not anything that looks as physical as driving a truck. … But times have changed.”
Before entering the trucking world, Sanders lived stints in Monroe and Winston counties, where she worked as a certified medical assistant, nursing assistant and phlebotomist. But in 2011, she moved back to her hometown of Columbus to take care of her aging grandmother.
Sanders found a job as a bus driver for New Hope School District. She had no experience with driving commercial vehicles, and her grandmother warned her she may not could control the bus.
“My grandmother, when I started driving school buses, she said, ‘How are you going to drive that big ol’ bus? You’re a girl.’” Sanders said. “… And I said, ‘Grandma, I think I can do it. It’s not that big. It’s only (two axles) …’ So one day, I brought the bus by her house, and I blew the horn.”
Sanders earned her Class B license to drive the bus and said the experience made her “fall in love” with driving bigger vehicles. She decided to get a Class A commercial driver’s license and started working for Mississippi Highway Patrol as a CDL examiner starting in 2015.
In 2019, Sanders left trucking to work with the Department of Homeland Security. But after a few months, she missed being in big trucks too much to stay away. Before the end of the year, Sanders got her third-party testing license and started working at East Mississippi Community College as a tester, examiner and instructor.
Over the past eight years, Sanders estimated that she has trained hundreds of drivers. This includes pre-vehicle inspections, control skills, parts of the truck, backing and driving.
“If your heart isn’t in it, you shouldn’t do trucking,” Sanders said. “You’ll get out there and you will get careless because you’re just doing it for money. If you get careless and you’re not safe, it could be my children. It could be my mom. It could be my family member. It’s personal.”
Sanders said she takes particular pride in helping women learn to drive trucks. For many of her female students, trucking gave them freedom, independence and a greater ability to provide for their families.
One of her former female students now homeschools her child while driving across the country, she said. Another, whose family became homeless during the COVID-19 pandemic, earned enough from truck driving to purchase a new home.
“What’s a girl to do?” Sanders joked. “Trucking.”
Sanders said she has seen the number of female truckers increase, particularly over the past two years, indicating a change in the culture.
Still, Sanders said she is the only female truck driver in Mississippi to hold every endorsement possible.
According to Women in Trucking Association, the percentage of professional drivers who are female has increased to 13.7% in 2022, up from 7.9% in 2018.
Trucking can also be a viable career outlet for people with certain mental health issues, Sanders said.
“People that deal with anxiety and depression go into a shell,” Sanders said. “There’s a lot of truckers with anxiety on the road. And it helps them. I have a lot of people who say being in a truck is the best thing that ever happened to them. It gives them time to think. Believe it or not, a truck can be therapy.”
In April, Sanders started Elvira’s Trucking Academy, naming the company after her grandmother. Sanders said it is a way to honor her grandmother and the many opportunities she has as a female trucker that her grandmother never did.
The mobile training company provides classes to driving students within two to three weeks instead of the typical four to eight weeks. So far, 10 students have graduated.
Sanders said she trains drivers with Starkville Public Works and she recently pitched her services to the Oktibbeha County Board of Supervisors at the request of Road Manager Victor Collins.
“… We have a dire need for training,” Collins said. “I also employ one of her former students, and when he goes out to check his truck, it’s a night-and-day situation between the way he checks his vehicle and the way the rest of them check theirs.”
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