School Bus Management Part 1 – If the movie Con Air was filmed on a school bus

I’ve been bouncing around this idea for a post series for a while now. Time to bring it to life. And what better place to start than my very first school bus route? The one that almost made me quit. Yet taught me so very much.

When you decide to change life as you know it and become a public school bus driver,  you’ll find some parts of it quite frankly sucks.  All of those fears you have about operating a 29,000-pound vehicle full of feral children not only come true but are worse than you could ever imagine. And given student management is about 80% of the job, you can expect a LOT of the job to be challenging.

To be honest, the movie Con Air is not really a valid comparison for the students on my bus. I mean those were a bunch of criminals and murderers. Sealed in a big metal tube. Going hundreds of miles per hour. These kids were much worse than that.

It’s more like the movie Bad Boys from the early ’80s (starring a very young Sean Penn). That one was more along the lines of being trapped in a max-security juvenile prison with lots of fighting. Which is EXACTLY what my bus was like. That’s why to this day if I ever see somebody walking up to me with a pillowcase of soda cans, I’d turn around and go the other way.

Let’s take a step back. One of the great parts of being a school bus driver is you have a set route. You get to know the kids.  You get to know the parents.  You get to know the turns.  Which streets have low-hanging tree limbs?  Which have basketball hoops out too far from the curb?

Some drivers never look in the student mirror. All Quiet on the Western Front every morning and afternoon of every day. An autonomous job you can do with a lobotomy. Those are the trademarks of a 30-year veteran.

However, for the new guy, it is an entirely different ballgame. Because you’re not assigned a route, you start by filling in as a substitute driver.  And you are screwed. 

Because you can quite conceivably (and often) get a different route every morning AND every afternoon of EVERY day of the week   Now that’s not a big deal if you are a Spokane Valley native.  But, Dave here is NOT. 

Just think of squinting at tiny, faded, or blocked street signs to find the turns. Then weaving thru narrow residential areas with stuff parked/abandoned everywhere. Cars, RVs, boats, trailers. All the while having 40-70 screaming kids, who are trying to get you to make a wrong turn for fun. 

Now it’s true you get turn-by-turn written directions.  Which are not only impossible to read when you drive, but are never updated AND always wrong.

So after a few months of this, I took the first route that came open.  I didn’t care.  It couldn’t be worse than what I was doing.  But you are about to see Dave proven wrong yet again.

Not only was the route that come open one that no one wanted, but those that took it always transferred out to another route as soon as they could.  Because it came with the ultimate poison pill.

Now the elementary school students this route had were different on a couple of levels. To start with, the route had only ONE bus stop.  There are generally anywhere from 10 to 20 stops on a route.

Secondly, that stop was at a Catholic Charities housing complex that had been recently built.  I won’t call it out by name, but there is a Pope that would not be too happy being associated with this project. 

That one stop was a total of 32 students, Grades K-5th.  Only about half the capacity of my full-sized conventual 38-foot bus. I quickly found out that these kids made it feel and drive exactly like a prison transfer vehicle.

This housing complex was literally ONE mile from the school.  Technically a couple of feet inside the walk zone.  These kids were so bad I would run almost every red light just to get them off the bus as soon as possible.

Four times a day had to make this run with those horrible kids. I called it my own personal Mogadishu Mile.  Never knowing if I was going to get home safe at the end of the day.

Generally, with 30ish kids, you’ll have 2-3 troublemakers.  I had literally 25.  To put this in perspective, these students were only 7% of the population of the grade school they attended.  And yet, they were an amazing 85% of disciplinary problems.  The school had to add behavior staff specifically to deal with these students.

But hey, I was just the new guy who didn’t know any better. I thought this was normal. So I sucked it up. I accepted my personal mile of hell a couple of times in the AM, again in the PM, and took it in stride. Like putting sugar in my coffee.

Then I’d spend an extra hour at the end of the day doing my student infraction write-ups.  I generally filled out on average 15-20 a week (spoiler – I currently do about 6 for an ENTIRE school year). 

Transportation management at that time was pretty weak in following thru, so nothing ever came of my efforts to discipline these kids.  I felt like Andy Dufrene in the Shawshank.  This was just my routine now.

Although the school finally did kick off a 4th grader for a couple of months.  Of course only after she beat up a Kindergartener, and then cut up a seat and tore out some stuffing.  I guess the use of a shiv was the final straw.  But I KNOW you want some personal examples!

These kids were toxic to themselves and each other.  This is why this bus makes no other stops.  You can’t just mix these students with the general population. 

I had a father try to board his daughter at this stop. She was just starting school and not a part of the housing complex. I refused and called for another bus. Couldn’t do it. She would not have been safe.

Fighting was almost a daily occurrence. The best one was a girl that climbed across the TOP of five bus seats of a FULL bus and then did a spider monkey lunge at another girl. All of the back-and-forth “F-You” taunts didn’t help.

By the time I fought my way thru the sea of students to reach them, the attacker had the other girl’s hair from the seat behind. She was effectively using her body weight to pin the girl’s exposed neck across the seatback.  All the while she was just bare-knuckled windmill punching with the free fist. 

She got suspended from the bus for the rest of the school year. But if this kid can make it to MMA fighting age, I’ll bet on her in a cage match any day. And bet big.

I had one boy that would always try to grab the emergency brake button when getting on/off the bus.  Why?  To see the 15 tons of metal roll forward and crush some of the loading students, of course.

When I slapped his hand away from the brake button, he started yelling ‘the bus driver touched me!’ And then got everyone in the back of the bus to chant ‘the bus driver is an fag!’  Awesome.

Once when I was stopping to unload, I heard the emergency door buzzer.  For reasons I do not know, a bunch of these little monsters thought it would be fun to jump out the back of a MOVING bus when I got to the housing complex. 

I wrote up eight of them, but they still kept riding and weren’t kicked off. At least I got the school district security officer to ride along with me for a couple of days (in full tactical gear, of course).

Because it was taking so long to load these kids (calm down the fighting and get them to stay in a seat), it was decided that I should board the students in the apartment complex parking lot. Instead of the street, where traffic would back up and cause possible safety hazards. 

Not sure whose bright idea that was.  Yeah, take a 38-foot vehicle with a horrible turning radius, weave in thru a full parking lot of beat-up cars and broken trailers, and load 32 Future Felons of America.  What could go wrong?

The result was as you would expect.  It took ten times longer to load. No one would come out of the four-story apartments until I was fully parked.  Then they would slowly trickle out with coats half on and missing shoes. Giving those who did get on first more time to fight on the bus.

I finally got most of them to stand outside and line up at the appropriate time in the mornings. But then as I would thread the needle thru the lot to load them, some would sneak up from behind the bus and slap the rear dual tires with their hands. Yeah, a moving bus.

Then a few would use a blindspot to try and open emergency doors from the outside. Just to hear the buzzer, naturally.

And when the weather was good, I had one ingenious 2nd grader that liked to sprint across the nose of the bus out of nowhere to make me slam on the brakes.  Then he would giggle and point at the skid marks. Yep.  Back to the street.

Now I could go on and on about the swearing.  Every day I would hear more f-bombs than Joe Pesci and Samuel L Jackson ever said COMBINED.  I just stopped writing those up.

Racial slurs were everywhere.  The garbage was out of control. Even with a no-food policy, the bus was like a landfill after every run.  I did get them to stop throwing the belonging of other students out the windows.  And I curbed the giving of the middle finger to motorists at stoplights.

But the most amazing thing was just how mean these kids were.  I thought it took a lot more years to be skilled at such verbal cruelty.  And not just to each other. 

I had this black female 5th grader that would just taunt me without mercy.  I made her sit in the front seat to try and keep the overall bus conflict down.   

She kept telling me how her mom was going to get me fired.  Always had her phone ready;  either to record me or dial mom.  Just trying to get me to snap at her.

And once, she almost did.  I was telling her to sit down for the 10,000th time, and she just smiled and responded to me with a mock stutter. 

Are you kidding me?  Make fun of my speech impediment?  Did I just walk fifty years thru the Wayback machine to get bullied by a child in school again?  When nothing came of it, I lost what little respect I had left for the head of transportation. Of course, he’s no longer with the school district.

What an amazing collection of kids.  Sure, I understand the broken homes and how many students were going thru things I can’t imagine. 

But to be that mean in life at such a young age, with zero respect for anything or anyone, that’s just plain wrong.   Personal responsibility is an essential part of being human.

And without it, well …….. hmmmmm. I think you should forfeit your opposable thumbs. Kind of like a modern-day Scarlet Letter. And one of the few things that do separate us from the animals.

This post went long, but I wanted to give you just a little taste of how big a part of the student element is when honing your craft as a school bus driver.

But how does the story end?  How did I break out of this forty-foot yellow prison? Did I quell the riot? Or pardon the prisoners? For that, you’ll need to tune in for Part 2.

Bus Driver Confidential out!