Middle school in Florida was the worst two and a half years of my life, due to bullying that went largely unaddressed. The worst thing that happened to me in middle school didn’t involve bullying, but gross negligence on the part of the faculty.

I am autistic and rode on the special needs bus throughout middle school. Because my mother was still at work by the time school let out, the bus driver would drop me off at my best friend’s house, since his mother would be home to receive and look after us. It was a good arrangement that worked for all parties involved, until the one day when a member of the faculty screwed the pooch.

On that day, I was shepherded onto a bus for children who were not in special education by one of the teachers. I knew it wasn’t my bus. I tried to explain it to the driver and the teacher, but the teacher wasn’t listening, and before I knew it, the bus was departing from the school. Between this mix-up and anxiety from the crap I had to deal with during the regular school day, I completely lost it and had a full-blown panic attack, crying and desperately pleading to go on my proper bus.

The bus driver, for their part, was confused about what was going on. They radioed back to the school to figure out what was wrong with the kid who kept crying that this wasn’t his bus, but the faculty member who answered basically told them to disregard me, saying that I “cried about everything”.

Eventually, the bus driver dropped me off at the apartment complex where I lived. The problem now was that I couldn’t get into my home since I had no key, and there was no one home, so all I could do was sob in the parking lot.

Enter Supermom.

When my best friend was dropped off at his house, his mother was understandably confused as to why I wasn’t there. He told her what had happened, and she subsequently contacted my mother.

She made a beeline for home and made sure I was okay, then called the school to ask them what the f*** happened. When she learned that the faculty member the bus driver talked to said to disregard me on the grounds of my being a crybaby, she was P***ED. She was already displeased with the faculty’s seeming inability to address my bullying problem, but told them in no uncertain terms that if they didn’t get their s*** straightened out, especially in regards to making sure I was on the right bus going forward, she would form a one-woman picket line at the bus loop and invite the local news affiliate over so the whole county could watch her raise Hell.

I never had a mix-up with my bus ever again after that, and the bullying issue would soon be resolved when we moved to another state. It took me many years to deal with the trauma from attending that middle school, but I can safely say that leaving that middle school has been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

I’m a school bus driver. Today, an eight-year-old sitting near the front wanted to play Twenty Questions. I do this sometimes with the students: we take turns thinking of animals, and whoever else is playing asks questions and tries to learn enough information to guess what it is. Through the game, I’ve ended up explaining a decent amount of animal trivia to them.

Student: “Is it a mammal?”

Me: “Yes.”

Student: “Is it a human?

Me: “No.”

Student: “Is it you?

Me: “No! I’m human!”

Student: “No, you know too many things. You’re an alien!”

The kind of blunt compliment that children excel at!

I had to drive my kid to school one morning. She loves looking for the numbers on the local school buses. (They go from 1 to 200, a large school district.) When we are stopped at a light, we see a bus go across with a very unfortunate number…

Me: “I feel so sorry for that bus driver.”

My Kid: “Six seven! Six seven! Six seven!”

Related:
Meme It Till You Mean It

I remember being a nine-year-old in the mid 1980s. Our bus driver (a really nice lady, but she suffered no fools) keeps looking into her rear-view mirror and cursing. 

After a few more minutes of this, she stops the bus, rolls her window down, and starts screaming at some guy, whom I then realized was trying to drive past the bus.

Driver: *Pointed at the extended stop sign, screaming.* “IF YOU CAN’T F****** READ THEN GET IN THE BUS, AND I’LL HAUL YOUR IGNORANT A** TO SCHOOL SO YOU CAN LEARN!”

The driver turned down a side street quickly after that.

 That’s my clearest memory of being in the fourth grade, and it wasn’t even in the school.

I drive a small school bus, transporting students who live outside the main catchment areas for the schools they attend. So while most students at a given school live with a few miles of it, these students live further but still attend that school instead of a closer one for various reasons. Fewer students means smaller bus, which uses less fuel.

For one such school, I only have one student, a teenager. When she started riding the bus, she asked if we could listen to the radio, and I obliged with a warning that the radio didn’t always work well. I set it to an alt-rock station, and we had nice time listening to songs and chatting during commercials, until the radio would inevitably cut out after about twenty minutes.

This past week, the radio lasted a few songs longer, and we got tunes all the way to school. It was a nice surprise! Then came Friday. I picked her up, turned on the radio, and “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers came on, a song we both like a lot. The radio petered out just before the song ended, and didn’t come back to life the rest of the ride to school.

When it was evident after a few minutes that the radio was done for the day, the student mused:

Student: “The Killers killed the radio. Not much of a bright side to that.”