With school underway for Clinton City Schools, and the return of Sampson County Schools students next Monday, those big, familiar buses will be traversing the roads and navigating our neighborhoods again. And we all should be aware from a safety standpoint. But we should also understand the importance of those behind the wheel, entrusted with precious cargo each day.
School bus drivers make a positive impact on our children. While often in the background, quietly doing their job without bringing much attention to themselves, the roles they play go far beyond just driving the vehicle that takes children to and from school every day.
In many ways they are on the front lines — the first person a young person comes in contact with each day and, for many, the last person in the educational realm they see each afternoon.
They rise early and stay late, traveling, before the week’s end, thousands of miles across the great expanse of our county. And they do it with safety first in their mind, always aware that the passengers they pick up and bring back home day after day are our most precious possessions.
For that reason, and many more, school bus drivers treat them as such. Not only do they use great care and caution while driving students back and forth to school each day, but they also act as a child’s friend, cheerleader, disciplinarian and coach, seeing to it that children feel good about themselves, treat others with respect and learn even before they exit the vehicle.
It’s not unusual for children to develop strong ties with their bus drivers, leaning on them for advice and depending on the smile that beckons them to come aboard and get ready for a great day.
They can — and often do — set the tone for a child’s day.
The cheery greeting bus drivers offer, and the sincere smile they provide, can often change a child’s attitude quickly, letting them know that someone cares and wants them to have the best day possible.
While classroom teachers make a tremendous impact on students every single day, teaching and nurturing young minds, molding them into free thinkers, you can be sure educators aren’t the only ones who make a positive impact on a young person during the course of any school day.
Bus drivers, cafeteria workers, custodians, media specialists, nurses, secretaries and school administrators all have a hand in the educational process, too, and they each do a tremendous job of sparking interest in children and making them feel special.
Kindergarten children may not remember their first math lesson, but you can be sure they’ll remember the bus driver who gave them a special seat up front for the ride home, the cafeteria worker who gave them an extra roll or the janitor who showed them their way around the school.
All those things matter, too, setting the stage for the successes that young people will have in any given year. If they are, at an early age, made to feel important by every person tied to the school system, then their chances of success grow exponentially.
We tip our hat to all those who are responsible for a child’s educational success, and we particularly offer thanks today to bus drivers, the transportation services staff who, in the last month since school started, have seen that safety is at an optimum level for yet another school year.
With a new school year either underway or about to begin, those bright yellow buses are rolling along our highways with our public school children, and parents can be assured that those behind the wheel have their child’s safety at the forefront of their minds, not unlike other educational personnel.
We should be comforted in that fact.