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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. For our last 15 minutes today, your calls about and a guest analysis of school buses, more rare and more class-linked than they were in the past. What comes to mind when you think of a school bus? The color yellow, loud kids, youthfulness. What if you're a school bus driver? What's that been like for you? Many people have memories of the crucial role that school buses once played in their school commutes, but the number of kids riding them is dropping. Lora Kelley, associate editor of The Atlantic and an author of the Atlantic Daily newsletter reflected on them recently in the newsletter in an article titled The Uncertain Future of the Yellow School Bus. Hi Lora. Thank you for joining us on WNYC.

Lora Kelley: Hi. Thanks so much for having me on.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we'll open up the phones right away on this. Do you live in a place where kids take the school bus to school? If a school bus is an option for your kids, do they take the bus or do you drive them? This assumes they can't walk. 212-433-WNYC. If you took a school bus when you were in school, what do you remember about that experience socializing with other kids? Is it a different experience for your kids? Call us with anything you want to say or ask about school buses, past, present, and future. 212-433-WNYC call or text, 212-433-9692. Lora, did you ride the yellow school bus when you were a kid?

Lora Kelley: I was one of those lucky kids who lived close enough to my elementary school to walk, but I have some really strong, pretty nostalgic memories of riding the school bus on field trips and on special occasions like that. For me, the school bus, I really picture the yolky yellow exterior. I picture the vinyl seats of the bust attached with duct tape. I have a lot of memories of interactions with other kids, and teachers, and chaperones, and all that while participating in this classic ritual of American childhood.

Brian Lehrer: Want to share a memory that stands out to you even now?

Lora Kelley: Absolutely. I think the biggest one for me is just those seats. One of my biggest memories, I grew up in Evanston, Illinois, so just outside of Chicago. When we were middle schoolers, we took this big field trip to the State Capitol to Springfield. I just remember sitting on that bus for hours with all my classmates and just the social dynamics that played out. It was almost like a miniature stage for the dynamics of our middle school class as we chugged along the boring Illinois highways to go on this big class trip.

Brian Lehrer: I want to get right to the sociology of it today. You write in your article that after Brown v. Board of Education, buses became a potent symbol of desegregation, but now, they're a symbol of income disparity. What was it and what changed?

Lora Kelley: Absolutely. One big reason that I was so interested in writing about this topic when I saw that school bus ridership was declining was because there's a pretty stark split. There's been a dynamic brewing for years, but the pandemic really accelerated it, that a lot of kids whose parents are college-educated, kids with at least one college-educated parent are getting a ride to school or they're driving themselves to school.

The kids who maybe don't have a college-educated parent are still taking the bus and are actually taking the bus a little bit more. Some data from 2017 and the National Household Travel Survey found that about 70% of low-income kids ride the bus, whereas the majority of kids who are not from low-income families get a ride to school. It's a pretty stark split, and that's only really gotten bigger in the years since the pandemic began.

Brian Lehrer: Why do you think the better-off families whose kids could be getting on the bus avoid the bus?

Lora Kelley: It's a great question. This is something that I'd certainly be curious to hear if any listeners have thoughts on. I think that a big one is that a lot of people's work patterns change during the pandemic. A lot of people are now working remotely or working part-time remotely in certain jobs. Maybe one is to dip out during the day to take their kids to school.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Theresa in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Theresa.

Theresa: Hi. I'm going to be 70, and I went to Catholic school for 12 years in Southern New Jersey and we always took the bus. In grammar school, kids that their parents dropped them off, they were not treated kindly. The whole dynamics has changed.

Brian Lehrer: Not treated kindly how? Do you have a memory?

Theresa: [laughs] I have a memory. They were like, "You're a baby, your mommy had to bring you to school today," and stuff like that. I had some of the best times going to school on a school bus. In my freshman year in high school, the upperclassmen, they had an initiation for us to welcome us into high school on the bus.

Brian Lehrer: I'm afraid to ask, what was in the initiation?

Theresa: Oh, they just put hairspray in our hair or shaving cream and things like that. It was nothing too dramatic. It lets you know that you were in high school now.

Brian Lehrer: High school hazing from Theresa in Brooklyn. Thank you very much. I think Olivia in Brooklyn may have a memory like that. Olivia, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Olivia: Hi. First of all, obsessed with you. A little nervous, but I have a lot of memories of the school bus. We would do spoofs of songs. The cool kids would sit in the back. Usually, they were older and they would bully you if you were younger. I would fall asleep on the bus a lot. I'd wake up in the bus port, and God bless him, my bus driver, Oscar, would be like, "Okay, I'm going to drive back to school." He didn't realize I had fallen asleep. That was a cute memory, I guess.

I still remember my bus number, 33. I also remember that I really wanted to be a bus driver when I grew up because I love looking out the window, I guess. I was like, "I'm going to give all the kids candy. I'm going to put lights up. I'm going to make it look so cute." That's my memory of bus.

Brian Lehrer: Olivia, thank you. Great story. Lora, there was a time when I was little when I wanted to be a bus driver. A city bus driver, not so much a school bus driver, but I don't know, in a way, it's like the role of a host. Olivia was describing the school bus driver that she would have liked to be. As somebody who gives out candy to the kids, you're facilitating the community as a school bus driver.

Lora Kelley: Absolutely. I love hearing those stories because one thing that really stuck out to me when I was reading and reporting on school buses is that there's so much nostalgia tied up in the school bus for a lot of people. There are these special memories and people think of them as such an iconic part of going to school in America. Then nostalgia is also pretty complicated for a lot of people, it is a site of bullying, of discipline from the bus driver, if you don't have a bus driver who's handing out candy.

The role of the bus driver is complicated. It's this authority figure. It's a job that's not paid great. One thing that I talked about a bit in my article is that we are in the midst of a pretty severe bus driver shortage. That really picked up during the pandemic, but a lot of people don't want to do this job, it's a tough job. It has really strange hours and it can be really hard for people to get a second job in between if they're looking to get more income. It's really a tricky role.

Brian Lehrer: Ben, in Peekskill, you're on WNYC. You have kids in school now, right, Ben?

Ben: We've got two kids in elementary school now, a kindergartener and a third grader. We're right by this school. Our third grader doesn't take the bus anymore. He bikes himself on good weather days. He'll take the bus if it's rainy or something. Our kindergartener takes the bus every day. What I told the screener was two points, I guess. One was that we were actually having a fight with the school for about a year, trying to get our son allowed to walk himself to school a little bit younger than they normally allow.

Not that we didn't like the bus, but just he's got ADHD, it's good for him to have gross motor activity more often through the day and stuff. We've been very happy with the bus driving, but nevertheless, we were fighting to have that alternative anyway. We ultimately didn't win that fight. He rode the bus all through second grade. Third grade is when they let them walk themselves to and from.

Brian Lehrer: Ben, thank you for that story. Katherine in Kinnelon has a story too, I think, about her kids taking the bus, but now being driven to school. Right, Katherine? Hi.

Katherine: Hi. My kids attended school in Ardsley and I did what I could to keep them on the bus because I know it's the safest and the best environmental way to get to school. However, we tried with our son, they're both in graduate school now, but we did try very hard. We put him on the bus, but he would end up with a three-minute bus ride an hour before school started sitting in a dark hallway. It really made no sense because these small districts use the same bus system, so they send it out first for the high schoolers, ironically the ones who need to sleep in, and the latest to the elementary kids who are up.

Brian Lehrer: Right. The schedule didn't work out, I get it. I'm going to cut you short, Katherine, I apologize, only because our time is running out. We now have a school bus driver calling in. I want to make sure Margie in Nassau County gets a word in here. Margie, you're on WNYC, hello.

Margie: Hello. I'm a bus driver. I could almost be in [unintelligible 00:11:22] book as a newer, older person here. I started driving when I was about 60. Now, I'm 66.

Brian Lehrer: Do you like the job?

Margie: I've had lots of different jobs. This is a great job, I'm telling you. We are union, we have medical. I work in the morning, in the afternoons. I have the days off in the summer. It's really a terrific job and I work with great people.

Brian Lehrer: Do you do the split shift, morning and then afternoon pickup?

Margie: I do. That's what I'm doing now. I'm sitting outside of school that has early dismissal because they're getting into testing days and everything. It's great. I get up super early in the morning, which I love. There's really nothing to complain about. We're a small group. We're a group of drivers with a school district, we're not with a company. It's not a whole lot of us. It's just a really nice family feel.

Brian Lehrer: Margie, thank you very much. That was a nice call to end on. We have a minute left, Lora. Is the point of your article that you want to see some kind of a revival of the school bus for more communities and across more income strata because you think there's something lost as they decline and become more concentrated for low-income kids, or what do you hope will come of it?

Lora Kelley: It's a great question. I think that my forward-looking takeaway from this article is that I think that sometimes people overlook the school bus. It's a little bit in this liminal space where school on the bus, the kids are in the care of the school district, but they're not in class and they're not working toward improving test scores or anything like that. I spoke with a professor of education at Stanford who was really thinking about imaginative ways to use this time on the bus.

Could it be a space for film classes or for enrichment of some sort? I think that something that I would be really excited and interested to see going forward is just how people are imaginative about using this unique space in American childhood.

Brian Lehrer: The discipline factor?

Lora Kelley: That is a tough one. That's something that I would defer to people like the wonderful school bus driver who called in and experts like that. It's a really challenging one.

Brian Lehrer: Lora Kelly, associate editor at The Atlantic and author of The Atlantic Daily newsletter, writing recently in that newsletter about the yellow school buses as nostalgia and a piece of our present and perhaps future. Thank you so much.

Lora Kelley: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, stay tuned for All Of It.

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