Happy Friday

That’s my usual greeting to my fellow school bus drivers – Friday’s are always happy days for us.

This week, I started my Mid-Day runs, making for full days of work and about twice the mileage on my bus.  My bus is happier too; it wants to run, but the fastest I got it up to on the runs previously was maybe 35 mph and a very short stretch of 45mph  – very short.  Now I have to go out to the Land Lab, a farm a few miles away, and I get my old bus up to 45 for long stretches.  Old 25 feels friskier now.

Number 25 is a Blue Bird school bus, rated at 84 passengers. Yeah. maybe 84 kindergarteners, but it really holds 56 High School kids.  It has an unknown (to me) number of miles on it – the odometer reads 040210 after today’s runs.  I’m driving it about 50 -60 miles a day now, so the miles add up.  It’s 21 years old.

Being a school bus, it suffers abuse at the hands of the kids, and there is a woman at the barn whose side job is to fix seats and remove grafetti from them and to look after the interiors.

I have a job for her, after my Elementary run this afternoon.

One of my riders, a black boy with his name shaved into his head, got on board and poked the seatback in front of him with his pencil, making little holes in the vinyl.

77 of them.

That seat back is ruined and looks like a collander now.

His parents will be getting a $200 bill for the vandalism. Yep, vandalism.  The district considers defacing their buses as vandalism, and we are encouraged to catch the little fuckers in action and to write them up.  This kid has been a pain in the ass for a couple of weeks now.  He’s often late to his bus stop, and I’m holding up traffic in a big yellow bus with a number on all sides of it; people have called and complained.  I started running the morning route a few minutes late, just to get the stragglers there at their stops, but I have left him running a few times too.  Although I should wait till all the kids are seated before I take off, they were getting very slack about it, so I have begun driving off while they are still in the aisles, figuring out who they want to sit next to or some damn thing.

I really really want to floor it and teach the (*^)($s an object lesson on why they have to sit down immeadiately, but I also think that I may possibly regret that if one gets hurt, so I just let off the parking brake and begin idling away now and tell them to sit down now! 

My first stop is at a Day Care center at another Elementary school and one kid I pick up, a little girl has way too much energy to sit down on my bus – she’s up and out of her seat and standing in the aisles and GRRRR.

I have to remind her constantly to sit down, and writing her up has had no effect, dammit.  Well, I read her the riot act and now she sort of mostly stays in her seat, but for the last few weeks she’s had an obsession with porta-potties and has been telling me all about how I’m going to get a porta-potty for Christmas and how they are inside and and and and finally I had had enough, and told her a couple of days ago that if I heard ONE more word out of her I’d see to it that she never rode my bus again. 

This is an empty threat, but I said it in such a way that it sounded like I’d make it happen, and I gather that her parents would not be pleased if she lost her bus riding privilages. (that is what it is, a PRIVILAGE, not a right)  She’s been almost silent the last few days.

I wonder how long that will last.

I’ve been a figure of fun in the driver’s room after my runs, because I have a pen and know how to use it.  I have written more than 40 referrals since the beginning of the school year.  I am in Elementary Education; these kids WILL learn how to ride a school bus properly.  The rules on the bus are all about their safety, not for me to be an asshole (I have heard that said about me, damn kids) and I will not have any of them get hurt because they are disobeying the rules.

I do not actually care much if they get hurt, except that it reflects on their driver if they do, and as a matter of fact, teaching that object lesson is the way I think it has to be for some of these kids.  Some do not learn from hearing, they learn by doing, and if that’s what it takes, well, so be it.  I don’t care all that much.

That one who poked 77 holes in the seat back in front of him?  I’d be fine if I never saw his dumb ass again.  He lives closer to school than I did, and I walked; so can he.

I live in hope.

*****