I had two different instances where school buses came up in conversation recently.
One weekend morning a few weeks ago I had just walked out of the house with the dog when my newspaper delivery person drove up.
She was apologetic. “You didn’t call this morning about your paper being missing did you?”
“No,” I said with a smile. There have been times when I’ve called because the paper has been late.
“Thank you,” she said, relieved. “I also drive a school bus in the morning and sometimes I can’t get out to deliver as quickly as I could. Everytime you call it costs me $4.”
This woman’s been delivering my paper for years. She’s got a family of her own and she has to work two jobs to support herself. I decided right then that I wouldn’t whine so quickly when my paper is late.
Then earlier this week I was waiting outside the school to pick up my kids. An older gentleman struck up a conversation with me about the recent school board controversy. The topic focused on the bus fiasco of the start of the school year.
“If my grandson wasn’t being driven to school,” he said, “he would have to ride the bus for an hour and a half to get to school.”
Imagine that: riding the bus for a 90 minutes each way, every day. Three hours of a kid’s day wasted on riding the bus. That’s time that could’ve been used for study or for an extracurricular activity.
Busing kids such distances certainly does put them at a disadvantage, and while I’m all for diversity I would love to see a solution that doesn’t lock kids into a never-ending bus ride.