By the time you read this, National Walk to School Day will have come and gone, and with it a curious phenomenon called the “walking school bus,” an event where parents drop their kids off at a predetermined location so the kids can enjoy a “parent-escorted” walk to school. Maybe I’m missing something here, but what exactly is the point of having parents get in their cars and drive their children almost all the way to school? Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for the idea of walking to school– my kids almost always either walk or ride (or, in Clyde’s case, get pulled along in a trailer Maharaja-style, allowing him to alternate between greeting his adoring subjects and exhorting me to “pedal faster!”). Even so, it seems to me that encouraging parents to drive their children to a “walking” location is a little bit like circling the gym parking lot to get the space closest to the treadmill: At the very least it’s silly; at the worst, it’s counterproductive. I rather think that if organizers were really interested in promoting car-free methods of commuting, they would be promoting something I like to call the “driving school bus.”
Here’s the plan: Instead of parents driving their children to and from school every day, their children could instead all walk to a central location in each neighborhood, where the “driving school bus” would then pick them up and take them to school. I know, I know: It’s a revolutionary concept, but, in this age of global warming, it’s one whose time has come.
I may be channeling Andy Rooney here, but: What is up with all the people driving their kids to school these days? It’s ridiculous: Go to any school at dismissal time and it’s like watching the slowest, most boring parade in town. It is as if everyone decided at once to try out for a new Olympic exhibition sport: Synchronized Driving. (See each car inch ahead in the pick-up lane; see each driver take a sip from her venti latte; see each driver answer her cell phone–“What are you doing?”–“Sitting in the car behind you; what are you doing?”)
Whenever I ask people why their kids don’t ride the bus, their answer is usually some variant of the “my kids hate the bus–it’s too stinky/smelly/crazy” theme. This always makes me think back to my own bus riding days, when, because we lived in an outlying area, all the neighborhood kids had to be at the bus stop by six o’clock in the morning in order to make first bell at 7:45. And yet, even given all that, I can’t imagine ever telling my mother I didn’t want to ride the bus without also imagining her response: A glance up from her newspaper, a flick of her cigarette (everybody’s mother smoked back then) and a wry, “So, what’s your point?”
The truth is, though, that I really didn’t mind riding the bus; even back then I could tell it made me part of something larger; part of a community that didn’t, for once, only involve the members of my own family. Sure, school itself was a type of community, but this was different: This was one of those relationships forged by fire. How else can you explain the sense of comradeship that exists between people who have spent an entire week together sharing their bus stop with one deceased Holstein cow? (Don’t ask).
The sad part is, though, that I think that kind of community feeling is what the “walking school bus” organizers are after, but, just like conversation, community is something that can’t be forced: It happens where it is most natural. And for a lot of kids, there is no place more natural than the back seat of a stinky, smelly, crazy school bus–the driving kind.