A friend of mine drove a local school bus. Driving was a second or third job for him as the two hour early morning and mid- to late afternoon runs created time for mid-day and evening work. Driving, however, is what drove him.
“Never had a ticket. Never had an accident. Never had a lost child. Never got lost myself”, he would humbly say about his time in the driver’s seat. At Halloween and Christmas he put masks on the front of his yellow bus. He had a perpetual gleam in eyes even when he needed to look up into the large rear view mirror to tell a young boy, “Sit down, Mark”. I don’t believe he ever turned in a discipline referral to the school principals, because he talked with the children on their bus, not his bus.
Every fall there would be a moment resembling Forrest Gump’s first greeting with his school bus driver. Forrest introduced himself and she introduced herself and they began a morning and afternoon routine that lasted for years. Some years there were as few as thirty-some children on his bus, but most years there were 40-plus riders. He knew of them before their first day on a school bus and he knew about them years after they graduated. He knew their parents and their parents knew him on a first name basis. He never left a dropped off young child until he saw a wave from a parent at the door or in a waiting car. He was a parent in absentia for dozens of children twice each school day.
Like all veteran school bus drivers, he had his share of criers and pukers, kids whose forgotten lunch on the morning bus he delivered to the school offices, and kids who stood at their morning stop without a hat or mittens/gloves. He carried a box of spares.
One of the most meaningful moments of every school year occurred in the first week of June. On the last days of the school year, he would say with what some might call teary eyes, “I remember when she started Kindergarten. They are all so small and she was a brave one. She rode every day; seldom got a ride to school, until she got her driver’s license. For the last year or so, she drove to school with friends. I watched her grow up from a five year old to a fine young woman. This week, she rode every day and today she brought me a ‘Thank you’ card of being her driver and friend. She’s one of mine.”
He and our team of school bus drivers are unheralded educators of children. We are a rural district where most children ride our yellow buses to school. Let’s do the math. With approximately 170 days of school each year and an average route time in our district of 25 minutes, bus riding children spend more than 140 hours each school year on a school bus. That is equal to the amount of time a student spends in a secondary classroom for math or ELA or science. If a child rides every day of their Kindergarten year through tenth grade, the year a child can get a driver’s license, a child really grows up on a school bus with more than 1,500 hours of riding time or had a class each day with the same teacher for 11 years.
That is a lot of driver-rider contact time in which there is one driver and dozens of children on a school bus traveling back and forth between homes and school. We trust children to the safe driving care of our drivers. We trust their well-being and that a driver who knows them watches out over them every morning and every afternoon. Across the decades, our driving unheralded educators deliver every day.