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

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Or this. On a dry run to drop a time card for a new student, I arrive at a large, well-tended old house set back from Woodstock Boulevard behind two tall firs. A Foster Home. Two cheerful teenagers rush to answer my knock. No, Teresa’s not here. Yes, she lives here. They call for Tom, a bright young dadlike guy. Tom and I are on the veranda with paperwork. I will pick up Teresa at 7:58 each morning and bring her back by 3:40, starting Thursday. But here comes Teresa now, up the front steps. She sizes me up—a stranger with picture ID—and I see pure terror in her dark eyes. Teresa clings to Tom’s elbow, pleading, and says, “Are they going to take me away?”

Imagine. It’s not a Mom and Dad and the kids home, but Teresa has found a home here. She has an adult elbow to cling to, yet her world is so fragile.

They’re kids. They’re unfinished human beings. You never know. It turns out Dejarvis can be civil and funny when he wants to be. He’s a smart guy, older than the others, and on the bus we talk basketball. He plays. I doubt he truly believes that his bus driver has played and coached and refereed hoops. But we unwrap some language we both understand. The school has a team, he tells me. Yes, there are 12 of these alternative schools in the metro area. League play will begin in January.

Well, shoot. I wonder. Maybe I’ll shake out the old striped shirt and get on the court with these jokers.

Come January and basketball practice, Dejarvis didn’t come to the bus for five days in a row. Hoping he was just sick, I asked at school. What’s up with Dejarvis?

The principal told me Dejarvis got sliced up in that melee at Lloyd Center I’d read about in the paper. “He’ll be back when he gets out of the hospital.”

I didn’t know Dejarvis was a gang member.

“You didn’t?!” said the principal.

They come and they go. Why should I care? I drive them to school on a gray woolly morning, windshield wipers batting at a persistent mist. They wear their despair like two-G gravity blankets, and there’s a vacancy in my chest where concern should be. Just get them to school. But we were early this morning. The staff won’t open the school doors to this bunch until precisely 8:40, so I reroute the bus onto Bridgeton Road, along the Columbia River dike.

Drop the headphones, people. We’re taking the scenic route.

These garage-looking structures on the water are where rich people keep their yachts. The ones with tall poles are sailboats. Hoist a sail up that pole when the wind is right and you can go without a motor. And these here are houseboats. People live here.

“Nice places.”

I stopped the bus for a better look. This neighborhood is not exotic to me, but to them we were in Dubai or Lake Oswego.

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