This will be a bit of a different post. I mean how can I complain about only having 2 students on the bus, when 1 of them has been ill for 2 and 1/2 days and the other one only rides to school on Monday’s, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and I only take her home on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

So I guess it’s assumed that I don’t have a whole lot to do (correct) and if the student isn’t riding, I never leave the lot. (also true) So what is there to complain about you ask? Good question! Do you have any idea the really awful jobs that the admin people can find for you to do in this instance? well I won’t go into it, but suffice it to say, I would rather be on the bus. I had a lot of at the bus barn time this past week, I even got my bus #501 washed on the outside and the inside, I don’t think it’s had a bath since I drove it last year. Well it’s clean now, almost squeaky clean. I should clean my house so well.
anyway, I was sitting in the drivers room waiting for my time to go home when a couple of the relief drivers came in and were talking about one of the buses that drive into the middle school I drive into. (bus 69).
She has been overloaded for the past 2 weeks, and they have to send a sweeper bus out to pick up her overflow. What they do is take one complete stop off the bus and lighten the load a bit for her. They did it for me a couple of times at the start of the school year. This stop has 10 kids at it, I have no idea what came over me, but I volunteered to take the overload since I was at that school anyway AND there were days that I did not have a rider to take home. Why send out a big bus, when there is a smaller one already there? So now it has become a major cluster fuck at the admin level trying to figure out how they are going to handle this.

Now they are looking at giving me a bigger bus, changing all the pick up times for my 2 current students, like my high school girl wants to be picked up at 6AM instead of 6:15 AM. UGH, that would mean that I would have to pick up the middle school girl that’s downtown at 7AM instead of 7:08AM, just so I could get back to that one tiny stop in time to get them all to school. They have now decided that I will take them and drop them off every day. 1 decision made… well the other driver and I have figured out that she is over the limit for capacity in the afternoon so I’m going over there this afternoon and take her last stop home for her. I think I can handle 10 students.

Yesterday Zoe, came with me on my route to see where these girls live, and to get a feel for the route. She also had 4 of the 10 kids ride my bus last evening so they could get an idea of how that’s going to run for them. They loved it, I ask them if they felt weird riding the little bus, and they said NO we love it! We get home faster, this bus doesn’t smell funny, and it has more room for them to stretch their legs. I expect that at some point the admin guys will get their act together, and I will have bus 69′s last stop added to my route. Then it will just be a wait and see, to see if they change my bus. Basically Zoe told me that they would give me one of the “big” little buses, and that if one of the other drivers needed a spare bus, I would get shafted to one of the clunkers we still have on the line. Why not just give me enough students to fill my little bus? Even if it means splitting that last stop, and leave the buses with who is driving them now.
Like I said, its a cluster fuck up out there, and I’m not holding my breath for them to get this figured out.
Once again, no good deed shall go unpunished! What was I thinking????