Story Weekend: School Bus Tales

Do you have an interesting story that took place on a school bus? If so, we’d love to hear about it!http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photos-yellow-school-bus-image2688143

If you’re new to Story Weekend, here’s how it works: I pick a theme and you share something from your life that relates to that theme, however you interpret it. Thanks to all of you who’ve contributed. As always, there are a few “rules”:

▪ The story must be true

▪ Try to keep it under 100 words. Embrace the challenge! That’s about six or seven lines in the comment form. I want others to read your story, and most people tend to skip if it’s too long. I know how tough it is to “write tight” but I hope you’ll accept this as a challenge.

26 Comments

  1. Melanie on January 24, 2015 at 7:00 am

    I am one of the few adults who uses the public bus in my village that also takes kids to school. The other day I was quietly reading my book when one of the kids found an unclaimed satsuma rolling about on the floor. This was obviously exciting for a bunch of 12 and 13 year olds and they began throwing it at each other in high spirits.
    “Oh look it’s an ORANGE! Chuck it!”
    It was one of those moments of psychic foresight where I just knew what was going to happen. Sure enough, a segment of satsuma went splat on my shoulder then fell wetly onto the pages of my book. The whole bus went very, very quiet.

    I turned to look at the boy who had began the satsuma war, who looked genuinely terrified.
    “I didn’t throw it!” he said.
    “I don’t care!” I growled. “If it happens again I will complain to your school, I will complain to your mum, and I will complain to the council and get your bus pass taken off you. Also, IT IS A SATSUMA NOT AN ORANGE!!! LEARN THE DIFFERENCE!”

    I may have overreacted a tad, but I’m a bit possessive about my books. 😉

    • Melanie on January 24, 2015 at 7:01 am

      Whoa. Slightly over 100 words. Sorry!

      • Diane Chamberlain on January 24, 2015 at 9:45 am

        lol. You’re forgiven. I had to look up ‘satsuma’. There are two definitions. I’m going to assume this one was a “citrus fruit” rather than a “land snail”. 🙂

        • melanie on January 24, 2015 at 10:48 am

          I would have been even more upset if it had been a snail! to be fair it could have been a tangerine or clementine as well. I have never been entirely sure of the difference.

  2. Debbie Pawlowski on January 24, 2015 at 10:14 am

    Here is my school bus story… it’s not on the bus, bus at the bus stop. The year was 1979 or1980, I would have been 15 or 16 years old. There had be many random attacks of women in Minneapolis and my mom would make my dad drive me to the school bus stop and wait until the bus came. He would park across the street so that he would be the correct direction for him to go once the bus arrived. It was also a city bus stop too. This one morning, there was a middle aged lady waiting there for the city bus, and she kept looking over at my dad’s car. After a few minutes she said to me , ” that man in that car is making me nervous, that he is just sitting there”. And I said “oh, that’s just my dad, waiting for the my bus to come so I am safe”.

  3. Catherine on January 24, 2015 at 1:30 pm

    Bus 109! I always sat on the 4th row from the front, on the right. It was a great bus So great that on the last day of school one year, it overturned. No one was hurt but the following year, everyone knew exactly which dent in the roof belonged to their head!

  4. Joyce Whitley on January 24, 2015 at 4:03 pm

    My best friend had just moved into my parents rental that they had behind their own house. We both planned our first day of first grade to wear our most beautiful clothes and special hair bows etc. We walked to the bus stop together hand in hand. On the ride my friend started to feel bad and then she threw up. I am not good with people throwing up so I in turn threw up as well, all over her head. Still need counseling for to this trauma…

  5. Diane Chamberlain on January 24, 2015 at 4:23 pm

    I would have done exactly what you did. . .

  6. Christina Wible on January 24, 2015 at 5:15 pm

    I was used to seeing school buses in the US. Massive things that scooped up kids and then marched away. But when I visited a friend in London in the early 1990s I got a whole new perspective. For one thing the bus only seated about 16. After the children loaded the driver closed the doors and then walked back and checked the seatbelts and talked personally to each child. How did I know? We wanted to go to Morning Prayer at my friend’s son’s school that day and there was room for us to hitch a ride too!

    • Diane Chamberlain on January 24, 2015 at 7:43 pm

      A different world

  7. Nancy on January 24, 2015 at 6:38 pm

    It was 1963 at my Jr. High bus stop. After the girls rolled up our skirts and put on our makeup, out of our parents view, and the guys made sure their hair was greased to perfection, we loaded onto bus number 3 to be “greeted” by Betty the Bus Driver. Young, curvy, and semi – attractive in a vampish kind of way (tight capris and tons of makeup), her daily scowl made us aware of who was in charge. She was rough, gruff and just plain mean. She sped us to school every day, setting the bus speed record. Some days she would take a short cut, purposely missing bus stops, just to get to the school quickly. If we tried to complain, she yelled at us to shut up. When we arrived at school, we were always greeted by our principal who had a huge smile on his face. He greeted only our bus… no other bus. And, he seemed to linger at the bus long after we walked away. Eventually the truth came out. It seems Betty the Bus Driver and our married principal were having a torrid affair. I was too naïve at the time to figure that one out.

  8. Diane Chamberlain on January 24, 2015 at 7:45 pm

    Hmm. . . you’re giving me story ideas.

  9. Dana on January 24, 2015 at 9:51 pm

    ~ Nancy for the win. Wish I had something that juicy to report ~

    As a grade school “walker” I yearned to ride the bus. I didn’t know what happened on the bus, but man I wanted to ride it. Before entering seventh grade, I switched from public to private school, mainly so I could finally be a “bus rider.”

    I learned how to write in motion so I could procrastinate on my homework from the previous day. I learned how to change out of my uniform and into “real people clothes” without a speck of indecency. And, I learned I never wanted to ride a bus again. First on, last off.

    • Diane Chamberlain on January 25, 2015 at 3:21 pm

      I can see I missed out on a lot by not riding the bus.

  10. amp on January 24, 2015 at 11:44 pm

    Memories from God’s Own Country ..”Kerala” , India..

    17 years back…
    10 year old student, having a long journey in bus…almost 1 n half hours…though his home is 5 km from school…
    yeah, my school then had 5 or 6 buses and school have to route those buses through almost all door steps..
    each bus will have an ‘aaya” (school maid)… who will make sure that students are well behaved and will be there always for any needs..
    that time a famous bubble gum brand conducted a contest… collect the scores from wrappers and when it reach 100, you will get a CRICKET BAT !!!
    one of our friend was showing us those wrappers and it was close to 100 then…and we were shouting at each other…HEY GUYS HE IS GONNA GET A BAT !!
    All of a sudden this maid is there and was too furious at our behavior.. without even thinking whats this wrapper is all about…she grabbed it from him…and thrown out from the moving bus !!!

    its not the wrappers…we saw the CRICKET BAT itself slipping that close from us….

  11. Fran Currier on January 25, 2015 at 12:05 am

    Thank goodness I had a nice bus driver when I was in my senior year of high school. For some reason I was hardly ever hadat my bus stop on time. The bus driver would always wait for me while I ran down the hill from my house. Can’t figure why that always happened!!-

  12. Deborah Gill on January 25, 2015 at 7:54 am

    When I was a child my father was in the US Army and we traveled all over the place. When I was about 14 we lived in North Carolina just outside Ft. Bragg. Dad was sent to Viet Nam just after we moved there and mom was expecting my youngest sister. The kids were mostly local farm families. It was tough adjusting to life and fitting in, but one of the older girls took me under her wing. She became my mentor and introduced me to people so that I would be accepted. It turned from a bad to a great experience and to this day I think about how I would like to go back there some time to see how things are and if anyone is still living there that I knew those three years.

    • Diane Chamberlain on January 25, 2015 at 3:23 pm

      Have you ever looked up that girl as an adult? Would be fun to thank her now for the difference she made for you.

  13. Tracy Wright on January 25, 2015 at 11:53 am

    Our vintage bus made its way along the narrow streets, bougainvillea vines so close I could have touched them. The high school still operated on the Vietnam War schedule, so the sun was just creeping over the water buffalo in the rice paddies and the mountains on the perimeter. F-4 fighters screamed directly over heads as we passed the flight line. You could tell who was new because the roar made them flinch.

  14. Diane Chamberlain on January 25, 2015 at 3:23 pm

    Wow, you are a writer.

  15. Cory O'Neal on January 25, 2015 at 8:40 pm

    “Busing” officially known as School Assignments was the answer Portland Public Schools found to resolve their Civil Rights violations for unequal education practices in the late 70’s. To decrease white flight schools were rezoned. Our home school may no longer be within walking distances and, based on need of grade level, this reassignment may only be for a year or two. Neighborhoods, or in our case families, were sliced and decided then rezoned to create an ethnic mix in schools. Both white and minority kids were, dealt like playing cards then, bused based on grade level needs to create diversity. Casey, my sister would pass several schools, on the bus, to get to her new home high school. Casey was adopted at 2 and, is biracial (white and black). Our parents are white and this caused much confusion at the heated Town Hall meetings. As they protested and challenged the limitations, put on her, they were dismissed or stereotyped as more parents trying to escape their “black school assignment” to protect their white child. They weren’t ones to initiate conversations with labels or identifiers. Their concerns that Casey was one of only five children, chosen to add color and, bused to the all-white school went unheard. My brothers and I (three white children) were allowed to stay at the neighborhood school (within walking distance and 56% minority), though not with our sister.

  16. Janie on March 25, 2015 at 11:02 am

    Go back to say about 1968 when I was 10 years old. We lived in North Carolina and the buses had to stop at the railroad crossings. When they did, someone got to “run the tracks”. A student would be picked to get off the bus, look both ways down the track and signal for the driver to cross and jump back on the bus. It was my day and I couldn’t wait! I had long hair and I was running over the tracks with my hair blowing in the wind hearing all the kids yelling on the bus. When I go back on I realized why they were yelling. A kid had jumped up and swiped a piece of gum off the roof of the bus and it landed in my hair! I just cried. My mom had to work and work to get that nasty gum out.

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