Several years ago, I was driving home from work, turning off of a major roadway onto a residential street. A school bus was in front of me, making the same turn. Barely half a block after turning, the school bus stopped suddenly and its red flashing lights came on.

It was very different from how a bus usually drops kids off. Normally, they brake gradually and have yellow flashing lights as a warning. Not this time.

I was able to slam on my brakes and stop in time, fortunately. I barely had time to start wondering what the heck the bus driver was doing when I saw a young woman frantically running from the house on our right, heading for the street. She ran in front of the stopped bus… and scooped up her toddler, who had wandered into traffic.

While she was carrying her child back to the house, I dialed the “How is my driving?” phone number on the back of the school bus — to give major kudos to the quick-thinking driver who spotted the toddler in the street and not only avoided hitting her but also activated the bus’s red lights to stop other traffic.

I’m a school bus driver. The school district uses a program to help create the routes, and most of the time, it works great. But it has some strange notions at times: make a U-turn on a three-lane main road on a military base in a full-size bus? I don’t think so. This is why we review our routes at the start of the school year, or whenever changes are made, to catch little surprises like that. I noticed a few and was showing a coworker.

Me: “Look, the route for the first school has you drive down this road, turn onto a side street, go a quarter mile, circle the cul-de-sac, and then turn to go the exact same way down the road. There’s no point; there aren’t any students there and you don’t need to turn around at all.”

Coworker: “I’d just cross that out.”

Me: “I agree. And here! For the next school, it has me picking up a student at 8:55, and then driving four miles through residential streets and picking up another student also at 8:55.”

Coworker: *Facetiously* “No, that’s fine. The first student is at the beginning of the minute, and then you have fifty-nine seconds to get to the second student at the end of the minute. It makes perfect sense!”

My wife works as a school bus driver. During her morning run picking up elementary school students, the transportation supervisor calls her over the two-way radio.

Supervisor: “[Wife], I have [Student]’s mother on the phone. She says her son came in and told her you drove right past their stop and didn’t even slow down.”

Wife: “Can you have her ask him how his sister got on my bus at that stop?”

Our school district assigns numbers to the bus routes to differentiate them from each other. While most of our students are fine, if not great, we do have a few that make our jobs as bus drivers difficult. Several happen to be on one route, and the driver is currently on an extended leave. We other drivers have been covering her shifts, and we have been talking a lot about them.

Bus Driver #1: “Oh, my word, have you driven [Absent Driver]’s route? The kids won’t stay in their seats, and they yell the whole time!”

Bus Driver #2: “Yes! I did her route yesterday, and my ears are still ringing.”

Me: “I had to pull over three times to remind them to stay in their seats — once on the shoulder of the freeway.”

Bus Driver #3: “That’s route 333, isn’t it?”

Bus Driver #1: *Checking the route sheet* “Um, yes. 333.”

Me: “How did you remember the route number so easily? Did you drive it recently?”

Bus Driver #3: “Not for a while, no. But if you double the route number… Well, it just makes sense.”

I used to drive a school bus route. My supervisor had never driven a bus and did not even have a Commercial Driver’s License.

She’d tell me one day to use my own judgment, and then the next day, she’d get angry because I’d used my own judgment. So, I did what she said.

The required route took me up a mountain on a narrow one-lane road. Of course, I got stuck behind a parked car sticking out a little in the road. I called [Supervisor] (as required), and she and the police had to come out to figure out who owned the car, knock on their door, and ask them to move it.

One route — a paper printout of the required route — just stopped before returning to school. I should have just parked the bus there for the night.

The last straw was when there was a fight at the high school as classes were being dismissed. There were no school staff members to be seen during this whole time. Kids were slamming each other up against my bus. The fight moved down the parking lot, and I let scared kids onto my bus to get safe. I did not drive them anywhere; I just let them in and shut the doors.

[Supervisor] called the school the next morning and had a fit because those students weren’t on the list to be on my bus, and I did not get their names.

I hope she found someone before the afternoon route; I left my keys in the office right then!