I can’t imagine being a bus driver. 15 years ago when I was riding the bus regularly we were shits, but we knew where the limit was. Kids now don’t seem to know where to stop.
It’s a pretty sweet job honestly. Pay is good and it includes health insurance and a small pension, and you get the middle of the day to yourself. All you have to do is drive a big yellow Tonka truck around and put up with the occasional obnoxious middle-schooler.
I’m a school bus driver. I tried to enforce the mask-wearing rules towards the end of COVID and some of the kids literally threatened to kill me with a plastic bag over my head or with guns they said they would get from their dads. Nothing was done despite this all being video recorded. A few months later the same kids threw goldfish (the crackers, not the actual fish) at me and got banned from the bus for a week. Go figure.
My only real problem was with their choice of snack food. If they’d thrown white chocolate Kit-Kats at me I would have just picked them up and said nothing about it.
Y’all are saints for putting up with those little shitheads. It really sucks that the schools won’t do anything about threats of violence either, and that’s something I’ve heard from teachers too.
Covid really fucked this generation up. I was lucky enough to be well into college by the time it hit. With these kids their formative years were entirely online
Y’all are saints for putting up with those little shitheads. It really sucks that the schools won’t do anything about threats of violence either, and that’s something I’ve heard from teachers too.
Covid really fucked this generation up. I was lucky enough to be well into college by the time it hit. With these kids their formative years were entirely online
Why become or stay as a school bus driver if you can’t handle children? I don’t give a shit about the argument about the economy or whatever excuse someone will make for them. Throwing children at the side of the road and placing them in danger is far worse; I hope this bus driver gets jail time and barred from being near children.
This comments section makes me sick. Kids are fucking kids. They don’t “behave”— they’re just trying to enjoy life, they’re just reacting how they know, and they’re still learning. You don’t dump five-year-olds on the side of the road where they almost get hit by cars (that was part of the news article).
This also sounds like a great way to go to prison with a lot of parents extremely angry at you.
Maybe. A neighborhood bully went after me with a makeshift whip around that age. I lost my boot in the snow trying to run away fast enough. Most people are fine as you say. Some…are just broken.
You don’t dump five-year-olds on the side of the road
Strongly agree here. I don’t care what they were doing; they’re still kids in need of adult supervision.
You have a fundamental lack of understanding of child development. This is why we were abused as kids.
For so many goddamned reasons— especially if you don’t know anything about the kids— the word “behave” in this usage should not be allowed in adult usage. All it does is perpetuate harmful and false beliefs about children.
Yeah this wasn’t how the bus driver should’ve behaved. Perhaps decline driving them or drop them off in a safer location. They were 5 years old for crying out loud.
At the same time, there is clearly a need to show that actions have consequences and that if you break rules you’re punished for it. If the driver pulled into an abandoned parking lot and made them deboard in nice weather and stand there for 15 minutes before resuming, that would be fair. As adults it’s on us to guide children, and that means reinforcing good actions and discouraging bad actions – escalating to punishment if they keep acting out.
I agree with you that the person you’re responding to is being absurd. Punishment has to be carefully done. You need to create a situation that is undesirable but has absolutely no danger to their health nor wellbeing. Is that difficult? Yes. But that’s why we’re the adults.
The school should have worked with the driver much earlier to address the situation, before it escalated to this point. Even adults can only take so much, but it’s still on us to not lose control.
While not at the side of the road, where I’m from bus drivers have the right to throw anyone out at a bus station because there aren’t school buses per se. Although this is reserved for particularly rowdy individuals, I can’t imagine any bus driver emptying the entire bus. Definitely shitty & possibly dangerous thing to do.
Separate conversation: folks we rely on don’t have the support or tools to do their jobs safely and sanely. Kids are violent and beyond “unruly”.
I’m not suggesting I have an answer, I’m not suggesting dumping them was appropriate. I’m not suggesting “things were better in the good old days”.
I am suggesting something has evolved in society, (many suggest norms degraded with COVID isolation, maybe. Discuss.) to make these provider’s jobs harder, and many are so close to snapping we as society should recognize it, and help them.
I need more information about your username. Is it the trebuchet that acts as a taxi, as in you sit on it and drives along, or is a trebuchet service, where it uses its primary function to yeet you to your destination?
Yeah, I feel like people commenting didn’t read the article, there kids as young as 5 years old just… left by the side of the road.
If you imagine this being done to high schoolers, it’d be easier to wrap your head around (although even then the fact that he ditched everyone on the entire bus is a bit insane). But just, leaving a 5-year old by the side of the road?
Absolutely, it’d be a stupid and irresponsible thing to do, but, people do stupid and irresponsible stuff all the time. Sometimes you can imagine yourself making such a mistake, or at least, understand the mental process that led to it.
kids as young as 5 years old just… left by the side of the road
I’m a school bus driver in the US and here you’re not even allowed to unload kids that young at their actual stop unless there’s an adult there waiting to take them. Doing this shit here would get you fired for sure and possibly arrested.
Imagine you, as an adult, are riding a bus and a handful of crazy people are acting like assholes so the driver makes all of you get off the bus, potential miles from where you live. I don’t think this would be ok even with older people. Plus there’s the fact that we don’t even know how bad the misbehavior was. Unless every single one were causing a significant danger, there’s no reason to kick them off.
Precisely because they’re 5 it’s important they learn early. Otherwise they’ll become… well, Australians. I hear they are one of the big sex slaves of the US, politics-wise.
Add comment