Tales from the bus are already thriving.  Why do ordinary laid-back high school students go wild when they step onto the bus? 

On route 703, riders have experienced inconvenient delays and behavior issues creating route disruptions.    

“There was a girl who got stuck in her seat,¨ Adelaide Mclaughlin, 9, said. ¨At her stop, she could not get up. I wanted to get off the bus. Some kid even jumped out the window. A group of us were ready to open the back door. I was frustrated because we all could have walked home. We were in our neighborhood. Firefighters had to show up to help her. But, that was an adventure.¨

The next day, the bus driver on route 703 contacted an administrator before leaving the parking lot.  

¨We were on the bus getting ready to leave, and the bus driver thought she saw a student vaping in the back of the bus,” Avery Goodman, 10, said. ¨So she called an administrator to get it checked out. When the student was removed from the bus she got searched for the vape and we had to stay in the bus loop while the other buses left. Then, we got to leave. Honestly, I thought it was a bit ridiculous because of the fact that we had to wait for her when she was doing something that she shouldn’t have been doing.”

Currently, Chesterfield County is short staffed with bus drivers and routes are being combined to meet the student demands.  Some students have found themselves sharing a seat with two other students.

¨I sat next to this girl and the whole seat was taken up,¨ Mira Morales, 10, said. ¨Every time I tried to get back on the seat I would slide off and I almost ran into the guy who was on the other seat. Over half my spine was off the seat and I was barely holding on.¨

The administration has taken notice to the situation and have altered the problems students faced. 

“The main issue is making sure buses are here at the end of the day,” Danielle Brown, Dean of Students, said. “With the new housing developments, we need more buses. We have split up some buses, since we got more, so there are not more than two people per seat.”