Once again, the summer has rolled around into autumn. The yellow school buses are out twice a day picking up children in the morning, and dropping them off at the end of the day for the waiting parent or baby-sitter. Leaving a quick medical appointment today, I was stopped three times behind different school buses as they delivered their charges to home. What should have been a short drive to my residence became a waiting game that lasted over forty-five minutes, as I was obliged to stop behind different yellow buses.
While I sat and waited, I was remembering the days when I was principal of the alternative school, and the bus drivers were my best friends. There was Miss Kanas, (not her real name, to protect her privacy) who could have been a guidance counselor, she was so good with the challenging students that she picked up and took home each day. A tiny, stocky woman, with tattoos on each arm, she was able to emphasize with the students on her bus, while listening to them complain about their situations, and then give them practical advice that they accepted.
On one side of her driver’s seat, there was a basket for the express reason to hold weapons that her passengers brought with them in the morning. Reminding them that if they brought a weapon into school, even just a jack-knife, they could be suspended for the rest of the year, so the sensible thing was to leave the weapon with her. Since most of the kids she drove were court-ordered into school, a suspension would mean that they were locked up. Miss Kanas never ordered a student to leave his weapon in the basket, but for the most part, they honored her wisdom and left their weapons in her basket.
Miss Kanas also went out of her way to meet all the parents of the students that she transported. Using her own fuel and automobile, she spent evenings driving around visiting with the families of her passengers. She sometimes worked out a signal by tooting her horn in a ta-ta-tata to let a mother know that her child had come on the bus with a really dangerous weapon, and Miss Kanas expected that mom to come out to the bus and retrieve the weapon.
Miss Kanas allowed her students to eat on her bus, which was absolutely taboo with other drivers. The only thing Miss Kanas said was that the privilege to eat came with the regulation that they put their trash in a box on the side of her seat opposite the weapon basket. Occasionally Miss Kanas even brought food on the bus in the mornings for whom she called her starving kids. Sometimes it was doughnuts, other times apples or hard-boiled eggs. When I asked her how she was paying for those morning snacks, Miss Kanas just shrugged her shoulders and said it was worth it to see how happy it made her kids.
I never once heard any student complain about Miss Kanas. The kids arrived calm, peaceful, often just grinning when they left her bus in the mornings. No wonder that I considered her one of my best friends. The students on her bus had fewer behavior problems than many of the other students. There were days when I wished that Miss Kanas could drive every student in the school, and some of the faculty, also.
Other drivers were perhaps not as adept at empathizing with the students as Miss Kanas was, but all of them helped in the ways that they could. I often reminded them that they started and ended the school day for their passengers, and how they treated those kids could make a huge difference in how the students behaved in their classes. In other words, bus drivers were more valuable than they might realize.
There was another bus driver whom I really loved, and that was because he was my middle son. (I’ve promised my children that I will never use their real names in these little stories, so my bus driver son will only be known as Son.) Son was a senior in high-school and was allowed under state law to drive a school bus. He loved the job because of the money, but also because he really liked the kids on his route. He was often asked to drive an extra route because of his ability to get along with all his passengers. But this turned out to be a real problem.
In March that year, the principal of Son’s school called me at my school and said that Son had not been in his English class since January. Nearly a half semester had gone by without his presence in his required English class. When I confronted Son that evening, by saying that he was not going to be able to graduate with his class, he responded by saying, “Aw, mom, what’s so bad about repeating my senior year?”
Immediately, I said, “I’ll tell you what’s so bad. If you don’t march with your class in June, the next day you will pay me for everything you use in this house. Every egg, every slice of bread, every piece of laundry; you name it, you will have to pay me.”
In an absolutely shocked voice, Son said, “Mom, you would charge me?”
My reply was short but succinct, “You can take that to the bank!”
I have no idea how he managed, but he made up his missed classes and graduated right on time. Two days after Son accomplished what I thought was impossible, the Director of Transportation called to tell me that he would really miss my son. The Director said that Son had the ability to get along with the very worst students, and that he wished Son would become a regular driver.
Son just laughed when I relayed that message to him. For the next two years, he worked at different jobs, while taking classes at the local community college. Then he joined the Navy, and that became his career for the next twenty-five years. I often wonder if the experience at driving a school bus helped him become the productive and sensible man he was in the U.S. Navy.
Like I’ve already said, school bus-drivers are valuable people in the system. I know that was true of Miss Kanas and my Son. I consider every man or woman who tackles the job of driving kids to school and back home each day, some of the most important people in our nation. When we look for heroes, we need to look close to home and honor our school bus-drivers.
