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 grew up in a college town in CA, and it was about 50/50 between college guys and semi-retirees driving the buses. They were both interesting in their own ways. Both between how they handled the vehicles and us meet bags in the back. Nobody ever got hurt that I recall.
In elementary school, a couple of friends and I would gather up scrap lumber from the subdivision that was being built up around us and build bridges over a ditch between where we lived and a relatively clear path to school. The city would tear them out. This went on for a couple of years. I even testified before the city council about why we were making the bridges. A) It was fun to figure out how to build stuff and B) actually build it. I think we got pretty adept at it. They were pretty sturdy.
They eventually put in a concrete structure and a push button pedestrian crossing. We just waited for breaks in the traffic. Lol.
Must’ve been a South Carolina thing too because my dad was also a teenage burnout bus driver
My wife used to go to school in London, using red double deckers, aged four. Nothing bad ever happened to her, and she was not the only one who arrived at school by bus, on their own.
I think it would be possible now on some bus lanes.
Then, as now, other bus passengers would soon sort out i.e. throw off the back platform, anyone who was iffy around a small child.
Suppose the difference was then each bus had a driver and ticket collector in uniform, now you just have a driver in a dreadful polyester polo shirt.
One of my middle school teachers in Raleigh, NC, Mr. Koop, had driven the bus as a teen. He was the teacher for photography and small engines and definitely the coolest teacher at the school IMO.
A couple of great electives and with the seemingly wide spectrum and perhaps bandwidth, sounds like a great teacher. Chemistry and practical mechanics are a great foundation for a logical mind.
Yeah, it was fine. I survived HS aged bus drivers in NC from 1968 thru 1980.
I have two aunts as well as my mom who all drove school buses in North Carolina in the early 70s.
My sister had a pretty nutty school bus driver, a young struggling actor in the Chicago suburbs. Wikipedia tells me he was actually in his 20s/30s at the time, but that didn’t stop him from behaving like a burnout and giving my sis a wildly inappropriate nickname. Eventually, John Malkovich made something of himself and my sister made it home alive on the school bus, so everybody wins.
So, are you saying John Malkovich drove your sister’s school bus? I hope she wasn’t damaged by that exposure.
He did! Any damage she might have is likely caused by other factors.
No doubt!
Hello. My wife was a Student School Bus Driver in North Carolina in the eighties.
We have lived in several East Coast towns from New Haven CT to Washington DC. Having the School Bus experience has made her an expert parallel parker, a helpful skill for city life.
Very cool. Does she still drive large vehicles?
Finding a good spot in a crowded city is a happy event.
I turned 16 in NC in 1986, and definitely wanted to be a bus driver, but alas my parents wouldn’t let me. I remember the student drivers were also used for field trips.
As a fellow Gen X’er, I’m often amazed at how drastically ideas have changed about what are acceptable parenting practices.
Around 1984-85, I recall I was left home alone for a period after my mother left for work but before it was time to walk to my friend’s house to meet up for the walk to school. I would have been 7 or 8 at this time. This was in Herndon, VA about mile from Dulles Airport.
In the later ’80s, it was common practice for me to wait in the old Plymouth Voyager “in charge” of my two younger brotheres in the parking lot of the grocery store while mom ran in for “a few things” which regularly turned into an hour-long wait and a full shopping cart. You can imagine the shenanigans that happened in and around that van with three bored boys ranging in age from 3-12.
I’m quite sure all this would be somehow illegal today. And my parents were more safety conscious than many others. We wore seatbelts religiously and the younger kids were always in the proper car seat type for their size (or what was considered proper at the time anyway.)
When I was in second grade, I had to walk a mile to school in 2nd grade in Miami, FL, along a major stroad (Kendall Rd.) My mother had someone who would drive me to school 3 days a week, and someone else would pick me up 2 days a week, but 5 times a week I was responsible for getting there myself and then staying home until she got home from work a couple of hours later. One of the key facts was I could ride the school bus, but the closest stop was a 1 mile in the other direction.
In the early 60’s my brother and I rode in the back of a pickup truck, unrestrained, with hay straw blowing in our eyes. And often being driven by someone who might not have been sober.
Somehow, we survived.
We were all shocked when my boss said he drove the bus to school (NC), but i’m shocked about what my wife has to deal with as a bus driver today. Call parents about their kids behavior? Fill out 12 forms a day? Be genuinely scared about certain ones on your bus and have zero control of the situation? Oh and then drive a giant low bid platform maintained by the least possible cost model. School bus days are numbered.
I can barely imagine. I am so annoyed by the irresponsibility of some parents these days. My son and his wife are in their early 30s and it annoys me that they have to deal with well, people who haven’t figured out to be adults.
My youngest sister has 4 kids and what has always frustrated her is that she can’t raise them more independently and self-sufficiently as we were raised, if not quite as extreme (late Gen X/early Millennial), as none of the other parents do the same, which makes it more even dangerous than we had it when it’s not outright illegal. For instance, in this suburb, it’s rare to see kids ride their bikes all over*, which makes it more dangerous—larger groups encountered often prime drivers for their presence whereas a single or pair of kids is unexpected, particularly problematic with modern vehicles that are too wide and tall and with limited visibility and added distractions that all that bullshit “safety” tech doesn’t compensate for.
*Except in more urban areas where they’re given unenforced illegal 3kw+ e-bikes to weave through traffic and get run over, then people blame the bikes rather than the dumb parents too busy smoking weed or whatever other dissociative behavior they practice to numb the reality of the lie they were sold to actually raise the kids they shouldn’t have had.
This isn’t just bikes, it’s nearly everything is an extreme, there’s no reasonably centrist choice for anything. Even schooling: there’s the choice (if one has the money) between overly sheltered parochial schools with weird politics and often complacent, incompetent admin and Lord-of-the-Flies public schools that even the “better” suburban schools have become to varying degrees (and this is MA, a state that’s one of the “highest rated” for schools in the country). [Further rant redacted, you’re welcome.]
As a non-American, my only exposure to school bus drivers is Otto from the Simpsons, so honestly this article only confirmed what I already thought.
Growing up we only had two kinds of bus drivers in my school district. Ottos and older ladies that ran those busses more rigid than Navy battleships.
The gas station I worked for let me drive a tow truck in high school. It turned out ok.
Same here.
You know what is even more crazy than barely 17 to busdrivers? Give a 17 yo a few weeks of training, a gun and then send them off to the jungle in Vietnam and expect him to kill people and survive, come back home without too much damage and deal with it.
Even more fun is those who were giving the keys to tanks, vehicles a bit more dangerous than a school bus, especially the shooting tube part.
So in the end driving a bus isn’t that strange. As several people pointed out ; a lot of kids in rural areas started to drive much earlier than allowed. In cars, motorbikes or tractors. Heck even I drove a tractor when I was like 14 for a short time. It wasn’t on the real road, but even then, back in the days people weren’t asses and roadrage was very limited. I can totally see how in 2026 it would be totally impossible for an underaged kid to drive a large schoolbus in current traffic. They’d probably be murdered by offended gun carrying individuals who can’t deal with the fact that a young person made a mistake in traffic and perhaps cut them off.
For the past 35 years, we’ve been sending those kids to the desert.
We’ve been telling them that they’re heroes, and that the world is thankful for their “service.”
They believe that their time there is keeping people on the other side of the world safe somehow.
Then they rotate back into the real world, and get frustrated because the “hero” badge doesn’t follow them everywhere, and they can’t just murder people they disagree with and get away with it… until they become cops.
Then it’s game on again.
More militaristic gear, more “us vs. them” culture, more plausible deniability when they fire the shot. They’re “heroes” again. And the rest of the people (the ones who aren’t in their club or signing their paychecks) are the new enemy combatants.
…and if they can’t make the cut to be cops? They can join ICE, the new presidentially-sanctioned Gestapo.
Unfortunately you summed it up pretty accurately… These are sad years.
I concur. Back in my Freshman and Sophomore HS years of 88 and 89 we had a very young in his 20s substitute bus driver. He drove like a bat out of hell and scared the everliving shit out of everyone but we all loved it. He would take the longer old single lane graffiti bridge route. I am forever grateful that he did because that was the very same bridge Prince wrote his Graffiti Bridge song about (I lived the next town over from his Paisley Park studios). That bridge was torn down my senior year and one classmate was able to get a 12″x 12″ x 1″ thick spray paint section of it.
Hey I got to fact check you here. I never heard of buses flipping, most drivers were parents or seniors augmentin their social security. I do recall when the passengers went wild a slam on the brakes was a corrective action. Are you sure you didn’t imbibe in a certain pharmaceutical object and then bing watch the Simpsons. Otto vs Otto?
Hi, current school bus driver here.
Fundamentally, one of the reasons there’s a school bus driver shortage now is because over the last 30 years driving a school bus has gone from a “whatever” job, on par with being a cashier or whatever, to a job where you are genuinely expected to be a competent professional with a lot of working knowledge of your vehicle and area and local laws, etc- but the pay is still as if that hasn’t changed. We’re still paid as if we’re a bunch of randos.
The safety info and stuff I have to know is just as much as any public bus driver & I’m required to give my bus a full inspection every day, but I’m making barely more than 18 bucks an hour- and that’s only when there are kids on the bus, otherwise it’s 12.
Am I just complaining? Yes, but this has been on my mind for a long time. It’s frustrating that my whole job is to take people’s kids to school and yet I could never afford to have kids myself.
But back then it was 3.35 minimum wage now it is $7.5 minimum wage and you make triple.
Not adjusted for inflation. Besides, whatever the actual numbers are, you could afford to have a life on that back then and you can’t now. I have to choose between car insurance and rent.
You do understand $3.35 35 years ago is less money than $7.50 today, right?
According to an inflation calculator, 3.35 in 1990 is 8.25 today.
The minimum wage is a cruel joke. $15 an hour is poverty wages these days. Also check your math, 7.5 x 3 is 22.5.
In a rural area those kids might have had years of experience driving tractors and trucks. I sometimes hear people say that farm kids are the best drivers. There is probably something to that. My grandfather spent time on his family farm driving tractors and trucks started driving a car at 14 to deliver papers then drove a tow truck and the school bus for a few years starting around 15 or 16. He never had an an at fault accident in his 70+ years of driving. I had both very young bus drivers ( 18 to 20) and older bus (45 to 50) drivers in the late 80s early 90s and only the older one shouted “oh no” while crashing into a row of parked cars then drove away.
City folks just don’t get it
My grandparents met on the school bus. My grandad was the driver and my grandmother rode. They are only about three years apart in age though. The was also in Mississippi in the 1930’s.
I’m a city kid and lived within walking distance of my elementary school, so no daily school bus rides for me, be the buses themselves short, long, or somewhere in between. So, other than the occasional class trip to some museum or the Statue of Liberty or whatever, I’ve little personal experience with the big yellow beasts. What little I recall is large, loud, and chaotic, with ride quality that makes my NA Miata seem like a Rolls.
Regardless, I enjoyed this Jason, and it’s nice to have some background about the character Otto from The Simpsons. 🙂
I’m assuming the insurance regulations were vastly different then too? Otherwise I would’ve expected the higher premiums on drivers that young to far exceed the wage savings. If not, I’m surprised the CDL requirement would put the kibosh on this faster than “dang that’s expensive to insure”.
You just had to get a bus endorsement back then in NC.
Yeah I’m okay with this practice.
Kids rise to the challenges, recall that Farragut was given temporary command of a captured ship at age 11.
Treat people like infants, that’s what they stay. It’s why I’m so against all this forced surveillance tech ostensibly sold as safety or as being of some convenience that’s minuscule at best and only for the terminally lazy and willfully helpless.
“Of course, I also realize that I would be very much alone in that opinion.”
No you wouldn’t.
I mean, if that’s the childhood you grew up with, Torch, that kinda explains a lot.
Thankfully it all worked out to our benefit. 😀