A School Bus from Nowhere: Connecting with “at risk” kids requires crazy and crucial hope

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I drive a bus filled with juvenile delinquents to a reform school. These kids—“at risk” kids is the polite term—have been so disruptive in their neighborhood schools that the district assigned them to a dreary set of medium-security classrooms out on Marine Drive. This is their last chance to attend school while they’re living at home. Their next stop might be the Mac—the MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility, in Woodburn, Oregon.

I chose this route because the hours are good and boredom is not a problem. My passengers are teenagers, old enough to have stories of their own and occasionally unmoody enough to spill them. Sad stories. Or, no, the beginnings of good stories, maybe. Stories that I’d like to turn around and play backward, so dad comes home, mom kicks her meth habit, and the cops turn out to be good guys after all.

You’d like to step in. Do something about this. Anybody would.

But I am 50 years older than they are. I don’t like their music and I don’t know an X-Station from a Play Box. It’s hard to understand their language and they don’t get mine. It’s not just the words, but how an elder tries to use them to reach a youngster he’d like to help. They don’t dislike me. We are curiosities to one another, failing to connect.

“I don’t need to read.”

Yes you do. Everybody needs to read.

“I’m going to be a welder. My uncle’s a welder and he makes $32 an hour.” Welders need to read instructions. Work orders. The sports section.

“My uncle can’t read.”

Or you’d like to strangle them. Anybody would.

Take this knucklehead with a swagger and shades who imagines himself the bull seal of the bus. I’ll call him Dejarvis. He began rapping aloud one morning to vivid lyrics on his CD player about killing cops and screwing people. “Run, nigger, run. POW. POW.”

Others, laughingly, picked it up in chorus.

They paid no mind to my reasoned pleas. Give me a break. This is inappropriate language. Weak stuff like that.

At school I secured the bus and went chest to chest with Dejarvis to block his exit. We exchanged ill-chosen words and then stood there surprised, eyeing each other unbudgingly—perhaps comprehendingly—across the void.

They wouldn’t be on this bus if they didn’t have a tortured relationship with school. Most of them have a fractured home life. They live with a grandparent or an aunt or a step-someone.

A sullen pale teenager with zits and a bad haircut comes to the bus from a shabby house in a neighborhood known to bus drivers as Felony Flats. Reeking of cigarettes and resentment, he has been sentenced to this demeaning short bus that teens citywide call a “retard bus.” It kills him to be seen getting on or off it. Would you expect him to have a sunny disposition?

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