I have held a class A for 15 years now, we had a local training guy that came to our shop and we put together a class for 6 guys and he trained us on the course and how to pass the pretrip test correctly. We had the trucks though and he set up the dmv test and the inspector came to our yard which was nice. If you don’t have access to a truck then school is the only option, $4K is a ok price, I know a few in CT are even north of $6k.