Get on the bus, Gus (and Trey and Ryan and….)

Well, it seems we finally have our bus snafu worked out. The bus showed up within 10 minutes of its scheduled time, in the correct place, with the correct bus number, in plenty of time to get the children to school, and managed to get them home this afternoon as well. Hooray!! For the uneducated, a little history:

Last year, the bus was heaven. We had a wonderful bus driver who was kind to the kids, but managed to keep the bus orderly. I never worried about Trey’s safety with bus 110. The bus would pick him up between 7:55-8:00 (school starts at 8:30) in front of our house, and drop him off between 4:00-4:15 (school gets out at 3:30). As we approached the start of school this year, I called the bus company to see if we needed to do anything to sign Trey up for bus service this year and they told me, “Stand outside your house at the same time this year, and we will pick him up.”

Well, of course the bus was later than usual the first day of school. Totally expected. It arrived around 8:15-8:20, still plenty of time to get to school before the first bell. But that is where all normalcy ended. For the next 2 weeks, the bus arrived at unpredictable times. I think the earliest it arrived was 8:15, and that only happened once. Most days, it was 8:20 or later, IF AT ALL. Several days the bus was so late arriving that the parents had to carpool together to get the children to school. I was late to appointments and work 50% of my first 2 weeks because of waiting so long at the bus stop and then having to drive the children to school.

The scariest day was this past Monday. We had received a note from the bus company on Friday saying that the bus number had changed, and giving us a new pick-up time of 7:30. Trey has decided he’d rather wait at the corner with all the other children than wait at our house by himself, so I walked him down with Crisana still mop-headed and in her pj’s at 7:25. By 7:30 all the neighborhood children (there are eight) were at the bus stop waiting. No bus. 7:40..no bus. 7:50…no bus. 8:00…no bus. And by this time neighborhood parents are starting to join me at the bus stop, frustration rising, wondering what to do. 8:10…NO BUS. By now, the children have been standing at the bus stop for 40 MINUTES waiting. Uh…HELLO??? So a dad and I split up the kids and decide to take them to school ourselves. I load up 3 kids (and Crisana – in her pj’s and slippers) and head to school. NO BUS. I try to call the bus company, but get shuttled around and transferred to one person after another and finally the call gets dropped. That afternoon, at 3:40, I receive a phone call from a neighbor mom saying that a different neighbor was going to go pick up our kids from school because THE BUS LEFT THEM. WHAT???!! You bet your bottom dollar that I was on the phone immediately, demanding to talk to a supervisor. YOU ARE KIDDING ME!! You LEFT 8 children at school?!? And come to find out, the school had put them on the wrong bus (the bus number change had apparently not been made known to school officials), the bus driver told them to get off, and NOBODY noticed that there were 8 kids standing unsupervised and unaccounted for in front of the school!!!

Well, thankfully, God was watching over our little angels these last few weeks, because they are all still safe and accounted for. And this morning the bus arrived reasonably on time, with a pleasant bus driver who still drops Trey off at our front door, much to my delight. We’ll see if this is the start of something good…