My oldest son played in a band as a high school student. (graduated in 2002)
Band name? Short Bus Refugees
I first noticed this specialized nature of short bus usage sometime around middle school. That would’ve been 1980-82. This is also the earliest I remember seeing short busses.
Boy, I hope I managed to phrase that politically correctly enough.
Wait a minute. I rode the short bus.
What? There were five kids on my route. Stop looking at me.
In the early 1980s, I attended a science/engineering magnet high school in the Buffalo Public School District. There were no school buses; most high school students were issued a pass to use public transit. Even though my school was fairly selective, and required an entrance exam, it still had to admit a certain number of “special” students. Since they couldn’t attend most academic classes – everything was honors-level – they spend much of the day in wood shop. (They were shipped off to a “special” school for their academic classes.) The term “wood shop” for us carried the same meaning as “short bus” elsewhere.
(Looking through yearbook) “Who’s this Timmy? I’ve never seen them in any classes.”
“Oh, they’re in wood shop (snicker)”
It wasn’t until the 1990s that I began to hear “short bus” associated with special needs students. I’ve also seen short buses prominently labeled “HEAD START” or “SPECIAL NEEDS ACADEMY”, as if to pound the point home.
An aside: when did the name “Timmy” become associated with the retarded? I’ve heard “little Timmy” used long before the Timmy character appeared in South Park.
I was in the gifted program in my district (which involved taking 12 AP classes, so, yeah, it was actually the gifted program). This involved going to a school that was outside my attendance zone. As in, all the kids in my neighborhood went to one high school, but my best friend and I went to another. The bus picked up about seven-to-ten of us on this side of town as its route. There was no need for a long bus, so lots of times, we got a short one, which wasn’t a big deal.
Catching the bus at 6:09 in the morning, however. . .that was certainly special. . .
Spectre of Pithecanthropus writes:
> It’s understood by pretty much everyone nowadays that when somebody
> mentions the short bus in regard to someone, they are saying that person is
> not very bright.
No, it isn’t. I never heard the term “short bus” being used as slang for “mentally handicapped.” I have seen short buses for most of my life, but they were mostly being used for physically handicapped people, and it wasn’t always for students. Sometimes they were used for physically handicapped adults as public transportation. It’s an overgeneralization to say that nearly every English speaker, or even nearly every American English speaker, uses the term in that way.
TheLoadedDog writes:
> Here, these buses were delightfully called “spaz buses”. There is a local
> comedian called Steady Eddy who has cerebral palsy. He rode these buses as a
> kid, and used to do a gag about them in his shows: “The teachers always told
> us we were normal and we didn’t stand out. Then they’d herd us onto a
> minibus with SPASTIC CENTRE OF NEW SOUTH WALES in two-foot high letters
> right down the side!”
I don’t know about Australia, but I’ve read that “spastic” only came to be considered as an insult in the U.K. more recently than in the U.S. In the U.S. “spastic” dropped out of clinical use by the 1960’s or 1970’s since it was used as an insult. In the U.K. it didn’t drop out of clinical use till the 1990’s.
In my are late 70’s early 80’s the special needs, not bad or dumb, children rode a specially eqipped bus, which was shorter than the others, probably because there was only a handful of students who rode and it and a equipping a larger bus would be a waste.
Pretty much what **Angel **said. I’m pretty sure I was in the gifted program, since I was doing algebra and trig in the fourth grade. They could have just told me that to keep me from feeling bad about myself, though.
I first heard the term in the mid 1970’s, starting when I was in the 4th grade (1975-1976). Up to the 3rd grade, I had gone to school in this ancient tiny schoolhouse. Our county built all new schools which opened in 1975. The elementary school I went to starting in the 4th grade consolidated three or four tiny elementary schools into one big school, and also had facilities for “special ed” students. Prior to this, these students had gone to their own school, but now they were to be “integrated” with the “normal” students. Of course, they were completely segregated from us, so it wasn’t much of an integration other than the fact we were all under the same roof. Starting in 1975, being “special” or “riding the short bus” both became the insult equivalent of calling someone a “retard”. The terms weren’t common before then, because the “special” students had always gone to their own school before and we hadn’t seen the short buses.
My HS civics class had to take a field trip one day.
Everyone in the class groaned when we saw the short bus the teacher had reserved for us.
It was used as a clinical term and also as an insult when I was at school in the late 70s and early 80s. But now that I think of it, I don’t remember hearing the term in either usage since. I’m guessing its negative connotations made the charities etc stop using it, and probably that in turn actually killed off the word as an insult, as schoolkids wouldn’t be familiar with it.
But adults of my generation will still sometimes say something like, “Don’t chuck a spaz” if somebody is getting agitated.
When I was in fifth grade, we moved in the middle of the school year, and the district wasn’t able to change my bus stop in the morning, so I ended up having to ride a short bus for a time.
In my case, there weren’t any mentally retarded students so much as juvenile delinquents. I think one girl was just learning disabled, but not to the point where she was considered “retarded”.
I only road it for about two weeks, because I ended up getting to school late, and my dad just drove me for the rest of the year. It was later that I ended up learning the association-I went to Catholic school, and we really didn’t have any “short bus” kids.
I never actually heard the term until I was an adult, but as a kid in the early 80’s (born '73) it was certainly the case that the special education kids rode in a short bus. I would have known exactly what anyone was talking about if I’d heard it.
(bolding mine) (except for the bolded name)
My wife and I both laughed hysterically at this part.
“Yes, Santo, two plus five IS seven! You get an A on your ahem trigonometry test!”
FYI, “Head Start” is a preschool program for children of low-income families, even those without mental retardation, physical or developmental disabilities.
Around here Headstart is for low-income kids, and Birth-To-Three then area SpEd preschools serve disabled kids.
pudytat72, this band was popular with my college classmates back in the mid-to-late 90s.
Just to round out the nomenclature, the special needs students in my school district in South Dakota in the late Seventies and early Eigties were called “Spedders”. This was due to all their equipment being spray stenciled with an acronym for SPecial EDucation SP.ED.
But he was known as “Mad Anthony”. 
Yah, the mad part was pretty confusing as well. All of the pictures that we saw of him showed him as being more pissed off than retarded. So I was actually sort of scared of retarded kids for a while.
“Mad Anthony” Wayne had a quick temper, and was so intrepid a tactician and commander that his plans could seem mad to the more conventional-minded.
*Insane * (even if he were) does not equate to *retarded * anyway, but yeah, try explaining that to a 9-year-old.