This Is Your Reminder That North Carolina Used To Let Teenage Burnouts Drive Your Kids To School

For a number of reasons, getting my kid on his bus to school has proven a surprising challenge this week. A lot of this is my fault; the kid stays up way too late, and then getting him out of bed in the morning proves to be a task on par with getting a recalcitrant bull deep in a K-hole to get out of a warm jacuzzi filled with thick, delicious pudding. But it’s not always our fault. Many times, the issue is that the school system simply doesn’t have enough bus drivers, so buses are always having to be delayed or substituted because there are just not enough people to drive them. Bus driver shortages have been an issue in North Carolina since I was a kid growing up here, but once, when I was a happy, sloppy child, they tried a bold solution to this problem: let teenagers who had barely started driving do the job.

I wrote about this around a decade ago for The Old Site, but I think it’s worth mentioning again, because the fundamental problem that brought about this baffling solution is still here, and it’s the sort of thing that, when I tell people about it, I get some really satisfying reactions of shock and dismay. The world is a very different place now than it was when I was riding school buses in the 1970s and 1980s, and it’s worth remembering that the standards of what is safe and acceptable for kids have changed pretty dramatically.

I think there have been studies that show that the concept of loving your kids and not wanting them to be in grave danger wasn’t a thing until, oh, probably the 1990s or so. With that in mind, the idea that parents would be okay with a 16-year-old kid with maybe three months of driving experience driving 30 kids to school behind the wheel of a huge Ford B-series school bus starts to make a bit more sense.

I’m not kidding: I had bus drivers who were literally 16 and had only just started driving. And most of these kids weren’t exactly the ones who got into the bus driving racket to pad collegiate portfolios or develop strong habits of responsibility. These were generally burnout kids who loved the idea of getting two whole periods out of class and making a bit of extra money to buy weed.

I’m saying this as someone who actually liked many of the teenagers who drove my buses. In elementary school, I thought they were pretty cool, and they sometimes brought boom boxes on the bus and played music, which was also pretty cool. Were they good, safe drivers? Hell no!

I mean, as far as I can tell, I’m not dead, so they must have done some things right, but I also remember that mailboxes were knocked off posts with a surprising frequency by these drivers as they got used to piloting those massive yellow beasts around, and I also recall that if you got to school and saw a group of your friends holding brown, coarse, wet paper towels to their heads that almost always meant that a bus had flopped onto its side as it took a turn too fast or braked at the wrong time.

I don’t recall anyone ever being seriously hurt, but I remember these things rolling over at least a couple of times per year throughout my school-bus-riding tenure.

Oh, and the fact that the only authority on those buses was teenagers just a few years older than most of their passengers made the on-bus culture something that would make Lord of the Flies feel like reading the minutes of a genteel gardening club. I saw some crazy shit go down on buses, fights that incorporated the hair-oil-slicked seatbacks in novel ways, unwanted lunches flung from windows onto passing cars, sometimes even into convertibles, should you be so lucky, and just all manner of the usual childhood madness, just concentrated into a yellow metal box and piloted by a kid whose entire inner monologue consisted solely of Lynyrd Skynyrd lyrics.

It’s not really shocking – again, these were drivers aged 16-17, primarily. Back in the 1986-1987 school year, North Carolina had 5,000 bus drivers under the age of 18, out of a pool of 14,350. And it’s not like they had fantastic records; the Charlotte-Mecklenburg County school system had students for 39% of their drivers, but they accounted for 64% of the bus crashes and incidents, which really isn’t shocking because, again, these are kids who just learned how to drive.

The reason that NC did this – along with 11 other states that got an exemption in 1968 to allow drivers under 18 years old to take kids to school (Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Virginia, and Wyoming) – was pretty obvious: money.

Students were just a hell of a lot cheaper than adults when it came to driving buses, and the difference was pretty significant. As the video below notes, where most states’ average cost for transporting kids to school was $39 per student, NC’s cheap-ass student drivers brought my state’s cost down to just $15 per student! That’s less than half! Surely that’s worth some mailbox decapitations and the occasional flop of a bus onto someone’s lawn, right?

I mean, in a lot of ways, the student bus driver program in NC was an outstanding success; the vast majority of kids got to school alive and undamaged, and the state saved a hell of a lot of money, up until the program was finally shut down in 1988. Plus, as much as I like to characterize the student drivers as burnouts, the truth is they did their jobs and showed up, and there’s no way that didn’t teach some degree of responsibility. There was something cool and empowering about student bus drivers, and even as a parent of a student who rides a bus to school, I don’t think I’d necessarily be against a revival of the practice.

Of course, I also realize that I would be very much alone in that opinion. Modern sensibilities are so wildly different from how they were in the 1970s and 1980s that just the idea of proposing such a thing now would be enough to get you ostracized from any PTA. I remember the dirty looks I’d get dropping my kid off at some school event in my old, airbag-unencumbered Beetle; I can just imagine what proposing that our precious children be driven to school every day by incredibly inexperienced drivers in aging vehicles with no seat belts.

Somehow, though, I don’t remember parents complaining about the student bus drivers at all. I don’t think my parents ever mentioned it even once, and they were well aware of who drove my bus, because as I recall, they knew some of the teens who did it and had all kinds of opinions about them. My dad wouldn’t hire them to mow the lawn, but to drive his 9-year-old son to school across town? Fine, why not?

Drivers with months of driving experience, no cell phones, no seat belts, minimal oversight – I’m sort of amazed that it was real. Eventually, by the 1990s, federal laws mandated that you’d need a CDL – commercial driver’s license – to drive a school bus, and those require a driver 18 years old at least. And it makes sense – a full-sized school bus is a far cry from the hand-me-down Ford Mavericks and Dodge K-Cars that most of these kids learned to drive on.

I suppose there’s some survivorship bias going on here, or perhaps some perverse sort of misplaced Gen X pride about the institutionalized and sometimes beneficial neglect that seems to have been the hallmark of parenting of that era, but I nevertheless feel some nostalgia for this admittedly hard-to-defend practice. Sometimes kids, even burnout kids, will step up to responsibility if you make that an option, and I think that’s a good thing.

Also, my bus driver in the sixth grade promised us all that he’d take the bus through a McDonald’s drive-through on the last day of school. It hasn’t happened yet, but I’m still hopeful one day I’ll hear the honk outside, and he’ll be there to make good on that promise. Until then, screw you, Keith.

Top graphic images:Vintage School Bus Fans FB group