The Bus Route That Cost Less Than Their Mileage
The loop was 26 miles, and it took 52 minutes, with a lift cycle at every stop, and it was the only way any of those four children got to school.
We live seventeen miles from the school. My husband Mark hauls soybeans and corn for the farm co-op, and in the fall he is out the door by 4:30 and does not come back until after dark. I work the day shift as an aide at the Cedar Fork Care Center, and I clock in at 7:30. Our old Dodge van, the one with the fold-down ramp Mark built himself, died in July. The shop in Lebanon wanted $4,100 for the transmission. We had about $900 and a plan to save the rest by Christmas.
Nobody came to our house. Nobody sent a letter that said we are sorry, we know what this means. The cut was Item 11 on the consent agenda at the June board meeting, a list the board approves all at once without discussion. “Transportation efficiencies, Route 14 elimination, estimated savings $11,000.” It passed at 9:40 at night, 4 to 3, with the gym half empty and the janitor already mopping the hall.
We found out in August because Hal told Mark at the co-op. He did not want to. He said it with his hat in his hand.
Mark called the superintendent twice. Dr. Randall Pierce was polite both times. He said his hands were tied by the board, and that the district had offered 45 cents a mile to any parent who drove a child themselves. He said it the way you read a line off a card.
Then Mark went to the August meeting and stood at the podium. The board gives each citizen three minutes, and he used every one. He did not yell. He said his son ran the morning announcements and the scoreboard clock on Friday nights, and that the district had spent $100,000 on a new turf field the year before and could not find one bus. His voice shook only once.
The board president was a man named Gene Faulkner, who farmed 800 acres of the best bottom ground in the county and had sat on the board 19 years. He had his reading glasses pushed up on his head, and when Mark finished, he said, “Thank you for your input, Mr. Nygaard. The vote stands.”
That was it. Thank you for your input.
Eli had been listening from the passenger seat. “It’s okay, Dad,” he said. “They don’t know me.”
That was the part that nearly killed me. It’s okay, Dad. They don’t know me.
The first week, we tried. I want you to know that we tried every reasonable thing.
I traded shifts and drove Eli myself on Tuesday and Wednesday. We put his old manual chair in the back of my Buick, and I lifted him from the seat and set him in it. It hurts his shoulders, because his shoulders do the work his legs cannot. By Wednesday afternoon the school nurse was on the phone telling me he was gray in the face and had skipped lunch so he would not have to push down the long hall.
On Thursday he stayed home. On Friday he stayed home. The care center scheduler, a kind woman who is not at fault for anything, told me gently that two missed shifts in a row was a pattern.