by Noah Magen

Listen to the story!

School Buses are a multi-million dollar industry used around the world to get students safely to and from school everyday. But many students take this for granted and say they'd rather find another way to get to school. South Anchorage High School sophomore Paris Cochran is one such student. She walks to school or gets rides from friends.

"I think it's a lot easier and quicker to get home walking or catching a ride with a friend than it is to take the bus," Cochran said.

What many teens don't realize is that each year more than 800 students are killed while walking or riding in a car to or from school, according to the National Association for Pupil Transportation. Steve Kalmes is the former president of the association and current director of the Anchorage Pupil Transit System—the organization that handles all the Anchorage School District's buses. He says riding the bus is the safest way to get to school and safety is top priority.

"Each year we give out safe driving awards. This year we gave out awards to people who had over 25 years of safe driving," he said.

In Kalmes' opinion, Alaska is one of the hardest places to run a bus system and the Anchorage Pupil Transit System is one of the best and safest in the country.

"In the south, I kid my friends who are in the business that they close school on the forecast of a snow. Well, we rarely close school in Alaska so our drivers here should get safety awards in dog years," he said.

How does the pupil transit system stay so safe? Kalmes thinks that top-notch training always helps.

"I believe we have one of the most stringent training programs in the country back when I first started driving a bus, ions ago, about the only test was catching the keys. The first time I actually drove a school bus was the first day on the route. These days before a driver can drive for the Anchorage School District there is a minimum of 40 hours of training. We do 20 hours of classroom and then we do 20 hours behind the wheel," he said.

But most of the students who ride the bus don't seem to know or appreciate how hard and strenuous the training is.

"I don't know, bus drivers don't take too much skill besides being to drive that big metal object known as a bus," South student Kristian Knutson said.

Student Paris Cochran thought otherwise.

"They have to know how to drive and I'm sure they have to go through training to drive a bus because I don't even know if there is a reverse on a bus and that might be hard especially in winter," she said.

Another student Carter Marvin had his own ideas on the bus training.

"They get in a place with cement you know a big...probably like a parking lot or something and then they drive around in circles and get really good at driving the big yellow bus," Marvin said.

Besides rigorous training, there are other qualifications bus drivers need to meet. All bus drivers have to be more than 21 years old, they have to have a clean driving record, the School District does background checks, and last they do pre-employment drug tests. One might ask how the School District employs enough drivers to drive 20,000 students on 1,300 routes everyday, well they don't. The School District only owns and operates one-third of the buses used to transport students, the other two-thirds are operated by major bus companies, like First Student. It costs millions of dollars to hire these companies every year.

With thousands of students riding the bus every day comes tons of wacky bus stories.

"This one time we were going to school and the bus driver suddenly gets all alert and he starts looking around in his mirror like something is up. And so there is this kid who sits up front and talks his ear off all the time and the kid was like what's going on and he said I think I smell something and the kid was like well I have chimmy chongas in my lunch," said South student Brain Campbell.

Sophomore Carter Marvin remembers the time an animal got on the bus.

"Well the bus stopped to pick up this one kid, I remember, and the doors opened and as soon as they opened someone's dog, it must have been a stray dog or some thing, comes running into the bus. And you know, naturally, all the kids, it was the morning, they were all kid of tired and it was really shocking. So they were all like ‘ahh, it's a dog,'" he said.

But then not all bus stories are so amusing. Sophomore Paris Cochran says she witnessed a fight on her bus.

"In 8th grade there was actually a fight on the bus and two kids got suspended. The bus driver waited ‘till we got to one of his stops before he actually intervened but then he kicked one of the kids off—well kind of, he made him sit in the front of the bus," Cochran said.

There are also plenty of bus stories about those infamously mean bus drivers. South High's Kristian Knutson remembers one of them.

"Well there was this bus driver last year and his name was Fernando and he was from Barcelona. He looked like a secret agent and he was pretty strict, like beyond all reason and he stuck to the rules that there was no eating or drinking on the bus. This one kid up in the front was drinking a Sprite and then Fernando was like ‘ Hey kid can I see your Sprite?' And the kid was like, ‘uh whatever,' because he had no idea what was going on. And then Fernando went ‘Wwwwaaaaahhhhh' and threw the Sprite at the window of the bus to prove his point that there was absolutely no drinking on the bus. The kid just looked sad and didn't know what just happened because it was so unexpected. But Fernando got fired for that action so he's no longer with us today," Knutson said.

Kalmes says he's heard a bountiful number of stories like these.

"Well I always say I really wish I had written them down because I could probably write a book on the things that have happened over the years but we you know everyday is different. Here we have about 500 employees that work in the student transportation business on a daily basis. You know, everything from our substitute drivers to mechanics and very rarely does a day go by where we don't have something interesting happen," he said.

Buses may not be the fastest or coolest way to drive to school but they are arguably one of the safest and most entertaining.