Online traffic school is approved now in nearly every county in California, except for a few holdouts such as Orange and Santa Clara counties. These counties run their own programs and therefore keep any revenue generated from traffic school in county coffers.

You might have missed the online traffic school list handed out by the courts, as it is often not easy to find.

The online traffic school list might be typed on a separate piece of paper inserted into the court booklet. Or, as in the case of Los Angeles County, you are directed by tiny print buried in the text on the front of the booklet. This text will direct you to go to the web site of the court for a list of approved online schools.

There are actually many entities responsible for the quality of classroom and online traffic school. Classroom traffic school programs must first be approved by the California DMV. Online programs exist because of a single sentence in the California vehicle code which says that courts may "at their discretion" offer an alternative to classroom traffic school. Therefore online programs go through the approval process required by each court.

The courts and the DMV then contract with one of four outside monitoring bodies. These monitoring bodies are then responsible for verifying that certain standards are met for court approved online traffic schools.