If he can’t figure out everybody’s address who lives on his block, he’s even dumber than he sounds. 
What kind of things did he assert about you in the PowerPoint? Inquiring minds want to know. (Partly because I watched a homeless guy scream at one of our security guards that his brother works at the paper and they know his name and he’s going to write a letter to the editor! One assumes they know his name because he’s always writing stupid crackpot letters to the editor.)
reminds self to never mess with The* Bus Guy***
Best post of the day, right there.
Dear Mr. Bus Guy,
You are my hero!
In our district all kids KG-3 are eligible for the bus. We live on a dead end, 2 houses away from the (always open) rear gate to the school yard. Still my son could take the bus but because we’re on a dead end the bus stop is a block away in the other direction (further away than the school itself).
My son walks or I drop him off on my way to work since I have to pass the main entrance.
These don’t (I can see the stop from my front window - and I’m home one day a week and have been paying attention). The SUV person is the strangest, since the kid sits in the car, and then, after the bus comes, the SUV turns around, drives two driveways down, and pulls into the garage!?!?!?! When I first noticed this - it was January, and Minnesota in January I’ve been known to drive my kids to the busstop and wait if its bitter cold - but this last Monday - the prompt for this post - it was a lovely 65 degree day.
Mr Bus Guy, you totally rock.
Socialise, or just boast about how great their own kids are? I’ve seen both.
The most heartfelt “me too” I’ve ever typed
Here’s one that we get in our development.
The bus has one stop to service our townhouse development which is basically a loop and the furthest spot from the bus stop to the town home located at the greatest distance would be maybe a quarter of a mile -though I’m sure it’s less.
Anyway we have parents who wait for their kids every afternoon as the bus drops them off. Issue? There are at least four or five who routinely wait in their cars for their kids, who then hop into the car to make the .25 mile trek back to the house. Not to appear overly judgmental but this always strikes me as about as pathetic as you can get.
Be fair to them. It’s in a loop, so it’s not actually STARING them in the face that they’re going in circles. A Google map showing their route might help. Maybe with a Powerpoint presentation to elucidate…
Wow, it took me 15 minutes to find the damn thing to re-read it.
*
“I cannot believe that a simple request has become a confrontational issue raised to this level. Based on the facts presented, my only assumption can be to wonder if this merely an ego-driven decision made to protect yourself from, despite your stated concern for safety, a complete disregard for the same.”
*
Keep in mind, this was after one phone call from his wife, and another from him Total of about 3 minutes all told.
"The incompetence displayed here, and the arrogance by which you thoughtlessly dismiss an entire neighborhood’s concern trouble me, and make me question what you are qualified to manage, when certainly your management of student based systems (MBG -this was my “?” moment)* is severely lacking the ability to make fair and compassionate decisions"*
So, in the end, because my boss is the compromising type and sees the value in not getting into a pissing match with a giant dick, we did a deal.
Deal was, we moved that one stop he wanted moved by one house to where he wanted it. But then in examining it, I saw we had 4 stops within 1/4 mile of each other. We eliminated two, and re-distributed all the kids. None of them walked more than about .13 miles to their stop. No one was really upset, it really was no big deal having to walk a few houses. But the couple mothers who did call me to ask why I did it, asked me if this had anything to do with their noisy, asshole neighbor. (paraphrasing)
“Well, we did have some concerns about stop locations that caused me to look closely at the route to make it more efficient.”
So I screwed him at work, and with his neighbors.
The only thing I felt remotely bad about was that I happened to be at their daughter’s school about 2 months later. Beth, the Principal was talking to one of the parent classroom volunteers. Kinda cute too. Aaaaand it was Mrs. Jagoff. She’s a very nice woman, and we ended up making nice with each other. Her husband - not so much - but mom and I are cool.
I’ve been :dubious:ing these parents for a few years now. One parent waiting with a group of several young children - OK, not how we did it when I went to school, but I can see why they feel the need and it doesn’t bother me. Parents waiting with older children on a suburban street…
The ones that really bother me, though, are the three houses that I pass on my way to work, who drive their children down to the end of their driveway whenever it so much as rains. The furthest is no more than 50 feet from the house. Haven’t they ever heard of umbrellas?
The whole bus stop thing is one of my peeves. Cut the cord already, people! My son is in middle school now (8th grade) and I haven’t taken him to the bus stop in a long time. We are four houses down from the bus stop- why in the world would I drive him there? He’s healthy, he has legs, and is 13. Even when he was in grade school the whole bus stop thing puzzled me. The amount of people sitting in their mini-vans and SUV caused a small traffic jam at the entrance to the sub every morning.
I will give him a lift if there is sleet, freezing rain, a really harsh wind, or extreme cold. I stopped taking him on a regular basis sometime after third grade. Even then, by the end of the school year I watched from the window until he was out of sight. He told me the other day that some of the other middle school kids wait in the mini-vans with their parents until the bus comes. Yeah, walking to the stop from six houses away is just too taxing.:rolleyes:
I weep for the future of civilisation.
I had no idea so much effort and complaining went in to the location of bus stops, but I should have known. I had to walk five blocks to get to my bus stop when I was in elementary school. It didn’t take me long to realize that if I just walked five blocks in the opposite direction instead, I’d be at school! :smack:
Nowadays I work nights and come home around the time the busses are picking kids up for school, so it’s become a total nuisance for me. I have to drive through the small town next to mine to get home, and for some reason, they’ve decided to make every goddamn stop right on Main Street. Like it would be so hard to get off the main road every few blocks and let people who actually have somewhere to go get past you, you bastard! Oh, and naturally these precious babies can’t walk more than a sixteenth of a mile, so they’ve got a stop every two blocks on Main St. It takes me over ten minutes to get through a town that normally takes thirty seconds to zip through!
Friendly tip for the people who decide bus stop locations and the whiny parents who influence those decisions: if a kid from one stop can wave at and yell to a kid at another stop and be clearly seen and heard by him, you’ve got too many freakin’ stops!
At age 5, I’d leave home with my sister (age 7) at 7:30am to walk about half a mile then wait and catch the bus. Then we’d be at school way early, and not really supervised - school started at 9am.
But the funniest part was that we’d catch the bus on it’s way south (the school was north). It’d go down a long dead-end road, turn around and come back. This took about five minutes., The mother (a friend of the family) of a kindergarten kid used to wait out the front of her house, so she could wave to her daughter coming back up the road. This went on for months until the scary big boys with beards, guns, and whiskey down the back of the bus (so I thought - they were actually probably about eleven years old) one day all waved back to her theatrically (it was no doubt planned). I thought it was hilarious.
It’s probably not that funny. One of those “you had to be there” moments, I guess; but the following day, the mother wasn’t there, and she never did it again.
<rant on>
In these parts, the wheels on the school bus don’t go 'round and 'round so much as they barely move at all. Why? Because the fucking cheesebox stops at every goddamn house with a kid. I shit you not, if there are three houses in a row with little monsters contained therein, then that bus makes three stops in a row.
And why do they do this? Because there aren’t any sidewalks on that particular street. Since when did walking become impossible due to a lack of concrete?
“But we have to think of the chirruns.”
Sorry, but fuck that noise. I don’t see little kids being brought up safely from all of the hazards of life, I see little kids becoming incapable of thinking for themselves, fending for themselves and exploring all the neat shit to be found outside their hermetically sealed homes. That creepy old house- the one with that weirdo? That’s what you’re supposed to walk past as a kid- it helps develop character and gives one that little tingle of terror.
Sweet baby Obama, what kind of world are we making for ourselves?
<rant off> whew, I’m spent.
Gee. Starting when I was in fourth grade, I was the last person out of our house in the morning and the only kid at my bus stop. My mother would set an alarm clock to remind me to go out for the bus.
And as long as we are ranting, lets rant about school drop off and pickup.
On VERY RARE occations I need to drop off my kids when school starts or pick them up as school ends. I make a point of this being a rare exception - the beginning and end of the school day are chaos. There isn’t room in the parking lot of all the walkers and buses - much less extra cars and parents - and I really try to be mindful of this. Any moving car in a parking lot filled with kids is a risk.
There are parents whose darlings cannot be exposed to the bus - or who live within the walking area who cannot be burdened to walk. So they pick up and drop off every day. This creates the huge line of moving cars - added to the buses. The buses line up in the same order every day - and the kids get onto them in a relatively orderly fashion. The parents drive up willy nilly - and with twenty cars floating around, kids knowing their parents are supposed to pick them up are darting all over the parking lot.
:::wipes tear from eye:::
That… was beautiful!
I have to admit, I did once ask the school district to move my daughter’s bus stop one block.
Of course, this was so that she could cross the busy 4-lane street where there was an actual crosswalk, rather than simply painting a target on the poor kid and asking the traffic to run her down… (and when I emailed the bus folks a link to the Google photo showing the difference, then they realized that they’d screwed up, as such a crossing was against their own policies).
On a normal day, there are 3 kids that get on at our stop, which happens to be at the entrance to our cul-de-sac. Moon Unit, age 11, we boot out the door and don’t watch her. We do stay around the house until we see/hear the bus pick the kids up (we can see the bus over the fence). And the parent of the first-grader does stay with her kid until the bus comes. The parent of the other 11 year old also usually stays which is excessive, on the other hand I think a big part of it is the opportunity to chat with the other parent.
My 14 year old does walk a couple of blocks to the bus stop. I don’t supervise (well, I walked with him the first 2 days, 2 years ago). I think he’d be mortified if I did!
I think we can safely assume that MBG IS the right man for the job. Heh, great read.