The Big Yellow Bus

Faith... For some reason, the Winston-Salem / Forsyth County school system has entrusted me with the safety and well being of 60+ students and a brand new school bus. Okay, all false modesty aside, I did score very well on the 5 days of classroom instruction and on the 3 days of driving. A very big difference, however, is that none of those children were around during my training. I'm running a route for middle school and one for high school each morning and afternoon. I take them to school in the morning and home again in the afternoon. I've just finished my first week and it has not been dull. For one thing, my morning route begins at 5:45 a.m. I don't have very many students who are "morning" people. If I'm very lucky, I'll get a grunt when I greet them, "Good morning!" Most of the time, I get ignored. In the afternoon, things change. The high school students will smile and return my greetings. The middle school kids make more racket than I heard at the last Wake Forest home basketball game. What are they feeding them at lunch? If I owned Red Bull, I would be checking the lunchroom leavings for energy ingredients I could use in my product. So far though things are working out. I ignore the middle schoolers and the high schoolers ignore me. One morning we ran about 10 minutes behind because of a Jack-in-the-Box puppy. I opened the bus doors and a student and dog got on. The dog had great fun playing "catch me if you can" and the kids already on the bus helped him when they could. The puppy's young girl owner finally caught him and took him off. As soon as she set him down, back in again he popped. After about a half dozen times of this new game, we finally got the timing down to the point that I was able to shut the door as the girl slid through and the puppy bumped his nose on a closed door. I think that we learned together that the best place for this dog each morning was in the house and not at the stop. My routes have several places where it is necessary to back up into a side road in order to turn around. My bus is 43 feet long, so it isn't an easy thing to turn it around in bright sunlight. It is very difficult in the dark and especially in the dark when it is raining. Most roads are not 43 feet wide. I know this because I have put both ends of the bus over the edges of the road. One morning, in the dark and rain, I got past a turn I was supposed to make. I looked for a place to do a back and turn and picked the wrong place. I backed up into a ditch and, had it been dry, would have been okay, but it was raining and had been for several hours. The back wheels sank to the axle. I got on the radio and announced to Control and all buses on my particular channel that I was stuck in a ditch on Vienna-Dozier Road. Control asked me, "Where on Vienna-Dozier?" Intelligently and in full possession of my emotions, I fired right back, "All the way across it! I'm blocking both lanes." Every driver using our staging lot has managed to find the time to kid me about that answer. Well, every school system car that had a blinking light, an extra bus, a huge wrecker, the highway patrol, and every homeowner within a 1/2 mile radius showed up for the spectacle. I stood by myself, in the rain, figuring that not only was I going to be fired, I was going to be made to walk home. Well, I'm still driving, but I think that, should I get caught even sneezing while driving the bus now, it will be the end of my job. To make the day even worse, on the afternoon route, my brand new bus over heated, had to be parked half way around the route until a mechanic came with coolant, and could not complete the high school portion of the run because of timing. Yesterday was some better although much colder. I couldn't get the heater to work. The high school students were much too sophisticated to say anything about something as mundane as being cold. On the other hand, I knew exactly how many middle school students I had on board because each one took it upon himself or herself to tell me that they were not only cold, they were freezing to death. The school system has faith in me. I have faith in me. Underneath it all, I think the children and parents have faith in me too. The thing that I have to do now is to continue to give them reason for that faith. It won't hurt to remember that the bus is 43 feet long too.