A little-known fact about me: I was a Waco I.S.D. school bus driver from August to November of 2009. I drove morning routes only. I learned a lot in my time in the big chair. I have broken my observations down as follows.
1. As a Driver – I am a member of a fairly exclusive club. I’ve got a Commercial Driver’s License with a passenger and school bus endorsement. Awww, yeah. By the way, in studying for those tests, I learned all kinds of things, like: you can carry up to 100 lbs. of ammunition on a city bus. You can transport some kinds of radioactive material on a city bus, but not in the passenger area.
Driving a school bus makes you feel powerful. A full-size school bus weighs about 11 tons. As I drove down the road I laughed down at the people in their Hummers and Durangos. The only thing that’s gonna knock over a school bus is a garbage truck, a dumptruck, a semi, or another school bus. On the flip side, when I first started I was terrified that I would pull up to stop and plow through the intersection no matter how hard I pushed on the brakes. Fortunately, school bus drivers are required to test the air brakes twice a week, and the emergency brake is mechanical, not air.
A school bus has seven mirrors. Two stick out in front of the bus so you can see your front wheels. The side mirrors are divided into four – two that see a wide swath of the side of the bus, and in the other two you can see the back wheels. That is very handy for not running over curbs. The rear-view mirror lets you see the passenger section, and the small area out the back door. So don’t tailgate a school bus. When I drive my car I still miss being able to look and see all of my wheels.
I resisted the urge so say awesome things on the CB like, “This is Red Seven standing by,” and “Luke, what’s wrong? You’ve turned off your targeting computer!” I did get to say, “320 to base,” “Ten-four,” “Over,” and answer the question, “What’s your 20?”
And yes, the wheels on the bus do go round and round. The wipers on the bus go swish, swish, swish. All through the town, in fact. It is as you have heard.
2. As a Parent – I was a sub driver for most of the time I was there, which meant I showed up and they handed me a folder that told me where to go. I didn’t know where I would be going until I got to the yard. Fortunately, most of my routes were special needs bus routes, where you have an aide on the bus that knew where we were going. One of the first ways I knew my perspective had changed is that when I picked up a child in a wheelchair, I didn’t think “What would it be like to be in a wheelchair?” I thought, “What would it be like to raise a child in a wheelchair?”
3. As a Wacoan – I have lived in Waco for eight years, but there were a LOT of elementary schools and areas of town I had never seen until I had to drive there. Waco natives, give yourself 1 point for each elementary school that you could drive to if you had to. (I’ll put an asterisk by all the ones I had never seen until I became a bus driver.)
Kendrick
West Avenue
Brook Avenue*
Viking Hills*
Bell’s Hill*
Sul Ross
South Waco
North Waco
Doris Miller*
Dean Highland
Crestview
Provident Heights
Lake Waco Montessori*
Cedar Ridge*
Hillcrest
Meadowbrook
Mountainview
How'd you score? And that’s not even mentioning the middle schools! If you are like me, a bunch of these you had driven by a lot, but never really noticed. If you drive on I-35, you probably pass Sul Ross everyday.
You don’t have to look too hard to find people who will say negative things about Waco I.S.D. schools and students. But my interactions with students were overwhelmingly positive. If I was unlucky and had to drive a regular route, it was the students who helped me find the next stop. Occasionally I would find one or two who gave me a hard time. But the vast majority were just kids trying to get to school.
4. As an Employee – As with most things, there are two kinds of bus drivers. There are the ones who clock in and out, collect the paycheck and head home, and there are the people who give the extra effort. On the days when I didn’t have a route, I rode along with other drivers to become more familiar with the streets. I rode with one guy who was just inspiring. A middle school girl came on with her posters encouraging people to vote for her as class president. He asked what she hoped to accomplish as president. When she gave a less than rousing reply, he encouraged her to think about what it meant to ask your peers to let you represent them, and what kind of responsibility that was. It was great.
I must also confess to judging a book my its cover. When I went in to interview for the job, my interviewer had on a do-rag, Yankee cap, big baggy shirt, wind pants, and some very nice sneakers. We talked for about two minutes, and I had the job. I thought, “What kind of Mickey Mouse operation are they running here?” As I came in day in and day out I found that the man in the Yankee hat is one of the most natural managers I had ever seen. He could almost instantaneously judge someone’s capability and character, and figure out how best to motivate them. He was a natural at defusing tense situations with humor. He was also uniformly polite and well-liked by everyone, even the people he had to correct, because he did it with respect.
5. As a Minority – For a few brief moments every day I got to be the minority. I wasn’t the only white guy in the room at the all-company meetings, but close. It reminded me that one of the unrecognized privileges of being in the majority is not having to think too much about the lives and issues of minorities. But as I sat in the room with all the single moms and their kids eating potato chips and powdered donuts for breakfast, as I drove through South Waco, East Waco, North Waco, as I saw the places people lived and how far their homes were from a grocery store, as I picked up a LOT of special needs kids living in government subsidized apartments, I thought about things that I don’t normally have to think about. And especially on those mornings when I was waiting for a bus route, and I watched the morning news with a room full of people who didn’t look like me, I noticed how everyone on tv looked like me. The newscasters, the people in the commercials, everybody. Even as the "minority" in the room, the television reminded them they were the real minorities. The people who looked like them showed up on the morning news in two places – in the crime beat, and whenever there was a report about the President of the United States of America. When I came back in after my route, the tv had always been switched to BET, and the Mo-Nique show.
