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
I am a retired professional driver, and it always frosts me that everybody wants to skimp on paying the driver. It’s a job that looks easy – most of the time – and if you do it well your passengers never notice anything you did. That is, in fact, your goal. But eventually it’s time to get control of the understeer before the bus slides into something, and then you’re going to wish you’d paid for a careful knowledgeable driver.
Most of the time you’re paid well to do something easy and enjoyable. You earn all that high pay in 60 seconds.
I had just started teaching in South Carolina for the Newberry County public schools; grades 7 & 8 Core (English and Social Studies). This was the early 1970’s and schools in SC were “separate but equal”, meaning segregated. I was white teaching in an all-black school and my 17 and 18 year old pupils (yes, that’s right, in the 8th grade)were the bus drivers.
That was the South, back then.
Speaking of paying bus drivers it often isn’t the pay per se it is the hours.
Post pandemic a local school district had signs in front of schools, all summer long, looking for bus drivers for the coming school year. Interestingly they all had various pay rates but they were $39.xx to $40.xx per hour. Unfortunately a school year is only 180 days, at least in my state. You might not even get 8hrs per day unless you pickup field trips or activities. On the plus side the district will pay for the training and you while taking the training and of course you get summers off.
Plus, the hours are split between morning and afternoon, so you can’t easily fit in any other jobs. One reason why a lot of drivers in my area are retired and just looking for a bit of extra cash but not a full-time job.
Yeah my friend’s now husband did that for a while after he “retired”.
When I was, oh, maybe 23, I was a residential counselor at a GT high school and driving around 15-passenger vans loaded with kids.
I fulfilled Keith’s vow to Torch. We were on a trip for a weekend and had $100 for food. McDonald’s at the time had a $1 Big Mac promotion. The kids wanted to go to McD’s and order 100 Big Macs… so we did.
It held up the drive thru for quite a while, and by the third day we were all heartily sick of eating tepid Big Macs that had been sliding around the floor of the van all weekend… but I’m pretty sure we all share a vivid memory of that trip.
I was one of those drivers, and most of this story is GREATLY embellished. About half of the drivers later went to college. There were no rollovers in our school district in the two years I drove, or the next two years that my brother drove. We raced the buses on the regular, but at the time NC law required that all school buses be governed at 35mph, so the “racing” was largely theoretical. Due to a state exemption, most of us didn’t even make minimum wage. But it was a fun job, we were able to take the buses home at night so we could be on time in the morning and so having a car wasn’t a requirement. (side note, the number of buses with white lettered tires and wax jobs was surprisingly high).
At 16, you were expected to be responsible. And for the most part, we were. Contrast that to today.
Graduated in ’88 in Smithfield, NC and I would agree that my bus driver in Sophomore/Junior year didn’t “seem” like a burnout but I do remember a few times close calls with other drivers (and our route went from one side of town to the other). I believe the Activity Buses (for sports teams & band) could reach 45 but don’t remember if students drove those or not…
I drove school bus in grad school; it was a great job and fit my schedule really well. I’m torn on this, because on the one hand, this is a terrible idea… but on the other hand, driving a big bus is a lot easier than I would’ve imagined, and I bet there’s a lot of teenagers who could handle the responsibility. I miss that job; I’ll probably go back when I retire in a few decades.
Also, I’m consistently amazed at how little bus technology has changed in more than 50 years.
As I recall several states used the National Guard to drive buses because of covid shortages. Wasn’t a bad idea frankly and some guardsmen got CDLs out of it.
I had never heard of this kid thing though, that’s batshit crazy
Thanks for bringing back bad memories of school bus rides from my time in NC public schools. For me the issue wasn’t the drivers, although mine always ended up being really old rather than too young, it was the rest of the students. The older kids in my shitty redneck Jr High basically were able to make life a living hell for me and other younger kids. It was fucking miserable. And the one time we almost had the bus turn over was because the regular driver got sick and we had a stereo typical angry, tiny man, coach who drove too fast and put the rear wheels in a ditch and threw all of us around and had the audacity to get up and start yelling at us when we were all screaming for him to slow down and not kill us all.
Yeah, school busses sucked in the 80s and it’s no wonder I’m doing my best to keep my kids off of them.
“and start yelling at us when we were all screaming for him to slow down and not kill us all.”
I remember having one school bus driver who couldn’t handle any noise. If the kids on the bus started chatting too much, he’d yell (in a southern-sounding accent) SHUUUUT UUUP.
As an adult, I think to myself “WTF was this jackass thinking in taking a schoolbus driving job if he couldn’t handle some noise?”
I basically got one old curmudgeon of a bus driver fired because he stopped at a RR crossing, a train was coming, and he decided to beat it across the tracks. I mentioned this to my mother, and he was no longer our bus driver.
Say what you will about California, but this was never a thing when I was a middle-school/high school kid in the late 70’s/early 80s.
And when I was a kid in gradeschool on an Air Force base in Upper Michgan – there were no busses for us.
We walked.
In the snow.
During 5 months of winter.
Uphill both ways?
The most solid path was either in the street – a no-no – or on top of the snowdrifts adjacent to the streets, a few feet above where the buried sidewalks were.
Every time I needed to cross a street, I had to climb down to street level, cross, then climb back up.
So effectively – Yes.
Definitely non of this in Maine at that time. In my town, then and today the majority of the school bus drivers were the school custodians. But it was a small town with no more than a dozen busses, so not much of a problem to get drivers. And a physically small town too – I actually was on the longest route in town, and the last kid to be dropped off (bus barn was right around the corner), and it was all of a 30 minute ride home. I was the last kid to be picked up in the morning though, which was nice – extra 30 minutes of sleep!
I can’t imagine what havoc I would have wrought behind the wheel of a bus at 16 though, give what I was like behind the wheel of a Subaru. But when I got my bus license in grad school, I was a very calm and cool driver behind the wheel (at least when I had passengers). Most of the time. Nobody saw me doing donuts in the snow in a coach, or winding the speedo needle off it’s face in that one coach with an 8V92T and an especially lenient governor out in the middle of nowhere Illinois late at night.
I never had student school bus drivers in Virginia, but both school systems I attended in North Carolina used them. The only issue I was when I was on the way to John J Blair Elementary in first or second grade and the mirror on our bus hit a truck or a truck mirror in the oncoming lane. We told the adults that it wasn’t the fault of Tracy, our driver, but I think he got canned anyway. It was the subject of my first long-form (a handwritten page or two) non-fiction story, “The Day The Mirrors Clashed”, which got me a reputation among the teachers that I could not live up to after college.
My mom has told me about this; she attended a rural high school in North Carolina in the late ’60s – early ’70s. She says there was a minimum GPA requirement for driving the bus at her school. She’s also told me many times about the day the brakes failed on one of those student-driven buses, resulting in one of her classmates being pinned to a wall. (Her classmate survived, but ended up losing her legs.)
When I was in my junior year in high school, in 1971 in Virginia, a classmate drove our bus. He was a really smart and well liked guy and a seemingly good driver, but one day he got just a bit off the two lane road and the soft shoulder pulled him into a bridge abutment, which broke off and allowed the bus to drop into the stream below. He was the only occupant, and wasn’t hurt, but that meant a lot of people were late to school that day.
Former school bus driver here. It was my semi-retirement job to supplement my retirement income until I could collect a Social Security check.
The pay was small – BUT – The vacations were great. Many of my coworkers were trying to live on this paycheck. They tended to wander off to higher paying jobs. One year, a few of them left to drive cement mixer trucks. Another year, a few left to drive for the school system on a near-by military installation.
It takes a special person to drive school bus. My trainer emphasized that the driver is the first and last impression that the student gets of the school system. There are a thousand ways to to make a student’s day worse. I tried to find one or two ways to make the day better.
Sometimes, the management sucked. My managers mostly were great. One year, we got 3 drivers from the next town to the east – Due to conflicts with their management. The next year, we got 3 drivers from the city to the north – again conflicts with their management. All of them were great drivers for us.
I really liked driving preschool and special needs busses.
Unfortunately, my heart got worse and I could no longer pass a CDL
(Commercial Driver License) physical. I worked on light bus repairs and
as a bus aide. The school district ran into financial problems (lower student population, closed an elementary school, etc). I ended up with an early retirement (my 2nd retirement) at age 64.
Somehow, it seems appropriate that my last day of work was riding in the back of the short bus.
Russ
It goes back further than you think. I was a sophomore in 1967 and our driver was a senior. He did well. Very careful and followed the rules. However, it was pandemonium in the back of the bus. I leared a lot back there.
The deadliest school bus crash in US history was driven by a 50 year old with a CDL and 28 years experience driving commercial trucks. Not necessarily relevant, but, trivia
An old coworker from SC used to tell me stories about this. He had this job as a 16 year old. It sounds like in his case he was pretty responsible with the bonus of parking the bus at his house at night. Different times. I tell my 10yr old that I spent my summers at his age picking up rocks from a sugar beet field for $5/day. I think we gave kids more credit back then that they could navigate and survive in the world.
Kids are capable of so much more than we think.
They yearn for the mines
Maybe that’s why Elon Musk has a zillion kids.
We used an old decommissioned school bus at a summer camp I worked at as a teen. The guy who officially drove it was essentially a teenage burnout, but was like 23. We used the bus on the weekends to go into town without any other supervision, and there were many occasions he’d let us try our hand at driving the bus. It was a fun experience for us teens, and never resulted in any property damage or loss of life or limb.
The only time we ever got into any trouble was with the actual driver at the wheel. One of the guys was standing at the giant front window mooning other motorists as they passed, and the driver thought it would be hilarious if he stomped on the brake. It was pretty hilarious, but we had to blame the now bare-ass-cracked windshield on hitting a bird to throw off suspicion when the camp director saw it.
Back in the early 80s I had a bus driver who was approximately 111 years old but had eyes in the back of her head and cat-like reflexes. If she were still alive (and honestly I wouldn’t be surprised to find out she is) I would still let her have a bus route.
Evidence that Springfield is in North Carolina?
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fRaU84dIoIs
And is that who Jason named his son after?
Ottoman! Bartdude!
As someone with a healthy/firsthand experience of knowing what the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest wants, “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.” is a prime example.
I wish the contest was still running so I could enter it.
That passage alone makes this article Glovebox-worthy.
Also, it seems oddly, even suspiciously specific.
The 90s was definitely the transitional period for switching from not really valuing the lives of children to valuing the lives of children more than anything. I consider it an improvement? But I always assumed that once the expectation of society switched from “we expected a few of them to die so we had 10” to “who the fuck can afford to have more than 3 of these” that preservation of the not so cheaply replaced spawn became more of a “Job #1”.
Regardless, driving a school bus is a real job and if you want someone to do it, pay the damn person. I get pretty annoyed at the people who complain about not being able to recruit bus drivers, but then simultaneously refuse to pay the taxes that would be required to pay them.
I think this is the biggest pile of crap I’ve read /\ to assume that parents didn’t care if their children died until the enlightened 90’s? Complete bullshit, and as one who lived thru the tumultous 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and 80’s I was there to see it. My kids were born in 69 and 70 and I can assure you I and every parent of that era cared deeply about our children, but those times were different. These parents lived thru WWII and Vietnam and had different expectations of what personal and governement sponsored responsibility meant, among other things.
I agree that people should be paid for the job they do, and the issue isn’t that the money isn’t there, it’s how our “enlightened political leaders” have chosen to spend it.
Not the OP, but I don’t see it as parents not caring, but rather society doing a lot of things that sure made it look like society didn’t care that much.
This too.
I’m not being serious when I say parents didn’t care before the 90s; that’s me just having fun exaggerating the change in overall attitude. Of course parents loved their kids, always. But as you said, times have changed.
Yeah I wasnt implying that in the 80s people were watching their children perish in accidents and reacting like its an episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos. Just that an attitude for safety hadn’t come along to reflect the high odds for longevity that was sort of a new phenomenon starting with the boomers.
We’re around the same age, so I’m sure you remember the commercials that came on and said, “It’s 10 o’clock, do you know where your children are?”
This is actually an observed phenomenon in sociology. Though date-wise, really amped up after a certain event in Colorado in 1999. For which this effect is named after. Basically, we have an increased perception of the role of the state and society-at-large in keeping children safe. And families before had a more let’s say generous risk-tolerance, as they tended to not focus on the worst possible outcome.
Does this specific event fit that model, kinda. Overall, it’s a pretty wacky thing to do in hindsight. But it could be seen how parents at the time, having not frequently been exposed to worst possible outcome, didn’t really know that they should care.
I think caring and valuing are sort of different in this context. I’m not implying that parents of past generations didnt care about their children (though like any family situation YMMV) or somehow didn’t care if they were alive or dead. But many decades to centuries ago, people definitely played the numbers game. Before medicine and technology came along to make it possible to aim for “zero untimely deaths”, if you wanted to ensure the family survived, you were probably going to want to have more than two kids. The 70s and 80s are sort of a weird lag time where the odds of survival were high, but the attitudes toward safety hadn’t quite caught up. Good or bad.
That’s exactly it, I grew up through the 80s into the 90s, and how I was raised vs me raising my kids were worlds apart. We were rolling around the back of the station wagon and seatbelt use was rare. Or we’d be riding our bikes around town and our parents would expect us to be home eventually, and they might only have a vague idea the area we’d be if even that. In hindsight I realize our parents mostly left us to do whatever without really being involved or keeping a close eye on us.
Shit in the early 80’s I used to go explore the crumbling old mercury mines from the days of the gold rush up in the hills behind our house. Our equipment? A propane camping lantern some D cell flashlights, and a bunch of laughably thin nylon rope my friends and I stole from the local golf course. Some of those mines were damn sketchy too. There were rumors of whole boxes of sweaty ancient dynamite just waiting to be found. I never found those but I did find plenty of sharp, rusty iron, heavy, loose rocks, slippery mud, badly rotten support timbers, pits to the depths of Hell and sometimes even skeletons of (I think) deer that long ago had wandered inside and died in the dark. At least I THINK they went in on their own but in retrospect maybe they were dragged in there by mountain lions.
A few of the mines were only accessible by deep airshafts. I never worked up the courage to shimmy down those but a few friends of mine did. And of course this was in earthquake country. Those mines are just a few miles from the epicenter of the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989.
Did I mention the rattlesnakes? Or the bees? Or the poison oak?
Unfortunately today those mines have been bulldozed closed so today’s kids can’t have the same experiences unless they dig their way in. We would have.
Did my parents care? They didn’t ask what we were up to so I have to assume it was willful ignorance. Although I DID tell them sometimes we had been hunting rattlesnakes and they shrugged and said OK. I didn’t show them the ones we brought home.
The children yearn for the mines.
Well its was the early 80’s. Heavy metal was big then.
That’s a great childhood experience and I’m jealous. We had no mines.
Here’s another one. When I was 4 or 5 or so my dad, himself a cheap bastard used to *save* money by taking us kids to a creepy, abandoned “Santa’s village” playground turned junkyard in the summer. We had to sneak in under a barbed wire fence and play on equipment that was made of splintery creosote soaked wood and bolted together metal. There was of course a creepy Santa for nightmare fuel.
What I particularly remember is the slide, it was metal so it was HOT AF in the summer and sectioned such that it randomly acted as a meat slicer! So fun to get to the bottom find a new hole in the shorts, maybe missing a couple of layers of skin too. And of course the creosote splinters and scrapes from the rusty exposed bolts were fun too. Thankfully we never got tetanus.
There was also a cockpit from an actual Korean war fighter jet. There wasn’t much more than the shell left but it was enough to play on.
It wasn’t all fun and games, we had to earn our keep too. When we got a bit older Dad would drive out to the national forest where he used us as free labor to collect free heavy (to a kid) rocks for his retaining wall project. He was adamant that it was legal to collect an unlimited amount of rocks there, whether he was right I have no idea. We loaded so many rocks into the Pinto shooting brake it squatted like a Carolina pickup which helped a bit when it came to unloading. That took many trips so we all got a lot of exercise those summers.
Good times.
Dang, now I’m even more green with envy. That Santa land was the bomb.
And nothing can beat the feeling of getting away with robbing rocks from the National forest.
I confess that in the backyard are some rocks that my old man and his old man liberated in similar circumstances back in the 60s. They drove grandpa’s Falcon Ranchero on fire roads with me along for the ride. Good times, officer, all good times.
I was born in 70 and my first car seat was a chicken box.
Aside from tipping over–and wow, we used to all pile on the outside on turns, and never toppled once–aren’t school buses so well-designed that the kids will be okay in a collision? Isn’t that the whole reason yellow buses are so different than city and transit buses? Those teenage drivers couldn’t hurt their passengers if they tried, right?
If that makes you feel better, please believe that.
Right?! RIGHT?!
Pretty much true now. All of our buses have seat belts now and the kids are required to wear them.
I remember my 3rd grade homeroom teacher was also my bus driver. I remember this because I was in love with her LOL
This Is Your Reminder That North Carolina Used To Let Teenage Burnouts Drive Your Kids To School
And yet people freak out at AVs
Do NOT give Elon any ideas about beta testing robotaxi SW on school buses. Side note…I saw two Tesla’s pass stopped buses (with red flashers) twice on the same road on the same day. Real drivers, so I suppose that is just training data.
Who me?