Big Yellow Bus Maniacs

I lived in the country as a kid, many long years ago, and until I was about sixteen I rode a big yellow school bus to school almost every day. A local farmer -- Suzy Hedges' dad -- drove that bus for most of those ten-plus years. I doubt that my Mom or Dad drove me to school on more than a couple of occasions in all those years, so the idea of driving your kids to school every day is completely foreign to me.

I first noticed this in Texas, where schools are designed with gigantic, switchbacking driveways so that parents' cars don't block the streets as school starts and ends. It doesn't always work, but that's not the point. Why, I wondered, don't these kids ride the buses that ply the streets like great yellow elephants?

I've heard that some kids on the buses bully other kids. That could be: hell, the only fight I ever had in school was on the bus, though I survived with my self-esteem intact.  But I think I've figured out the real story: the parents are scared of the morons driving the buses. In the past month, I've seen the following (all involving Lawrence, Indiana, MSD buses):

Two "shorty" buses full of kids rolling down I-465 around Indianapolis at 75 MPH (in a 55 MPH zone) Multiple instances of bus drivers rolling through stop signs And the crowning glory: when a street in front of a local school was gridlocked, one bus driver pulled across a double yellow line and drove on the wrong side of a two-lane road to pass stopped traffic, apparently in a hurry to drop off her passengers at the school. She nearly broadsided one car making a U-turn in a driveway.

Add these observations to the stories of a Houston school bus driver who killed a cyclist in a hit-and-run accident and an Austin bus driver who made a wrong turn and ended up 35 miles south of town in San Marcos, and I think I'd be scared to let my kids ride with these people, too. Apparently they think they're driving their personal vehicles (I wonder how many are yapping on their hands-free phones and answering their email...).

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