Vandalism. I don't know if I'll ever understand it. Maybe we should be grateful for it, though. Perhaps if we didn't have buildings and buses for crackpots to vandalize, they'd be going for more people.
For some reason my bus was the only one of the 4 parked at the school this weekend that was not damaged. I'm speculating that it's because mine was parked farther down the lot, off by itself.
The perps took some potshots at windows, damaging one windshield. They did not use a BB gun. They used a shotgun. And left some items behind on the ground that showed they were shooting from a fair distance...perhaps 100 yards or more.
Then they actually crawled UNDER the buses and flattened one front tire on each with an icepick. I'm thinking they were underneath so they couldn't be seen. Shielded by a small hill and then by the buses themselves, they could not have been seen from the nearby road. That's why I think my bus wasn't hit. It was all by itself, far enough from the hill that they would have had to cover a bit of open ground to get to it. And there would have been no shielding.
Someone reported it to the Sheriff, who called the Principal, who then called our lead driver. She spent most of yesterday afternoon reshuffling the bus routes so all the kids could get picked up this morning. And so I ran the Middle/High school route for my neighborhood this morning. Apparently we also have a driver in the hospital, so we were down a person anyway. She also thoughtfully went over to the school and moved my bus so it would be parked in front of the school, just yards off the 4-lane highway. No way somebody's going to poke around there in that kind of visibility.
Friday was also an exciting bus day. Exciting in a bad way, actually. I'd been having some trouble "learning" the ignition switch on my bus. It took a bit of "key acrobatics" to get it to turn on....put the key in, pull it out a skitch, jiggle it, say a prayer, and then turn.
Friday afternoon I found out it wasn't the ignition. It was the key all along. It snapped in half the long way after I stopped the bus during the route to have a "discussion" with one of my students. Here I was, in a quiet little lane with 13 kids on a Friday afternoon...wanting to go home. Fortunately it wasn't terribly hot. Another bus driver came and we moved the kids to his bus. But before we left the repair truck came. They managed to get the bus started, warning me not to turn it off until just before I went home.
Tomorrow will be a non-bus blog. I'll write about a book I finished and a couple movies we've watched.
9:29:33 AM 
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