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Show WOMEN AND WHEELS Young Mothers Serve Schools as Bus Drivers By Mary Lou Chapman A young mother we know has a part-time job driving a school bus. She not only thinks it's fun, and feels she is doing something worthwhile for the community but she also gets paid for her efforts. She puts in about four hours a day as a driver, working from io a in me morning and from 2:20 to 4:20 in the afternoon. Some mothers put in even more time than this. Our friend likes these hours. She says the job helps break up the housekeeping routine, and she enjoys being be-ing out-of-doors and with the children. I Miu Chapman live with Mama and Daddy in a red house.' This didn't help much. I kept asking for more information. in-formation. 'Well,' he said, 'We have a big black dog.' I finally had to go back to the school to solve my problem." Name Tags Help Often mothers sew the kindergartener's kinder-gartener's name and address on his Jacket. It's a good idea to be sure your child has memorized his name and address before he goes to school. The main problem is seeing that children cross the street safely on the way to and from the bus. They are likely to dart out without looking. The youngest young-est children usually are escorted across by an older schoolmate, their own mother or the bus driver. The drivers seem to agree that most motorists are careful to wait for the school bus when it stops. The bus drivers try to pull off the road to take on the young passengers whenever possible. "The bus itself is easy to drive, after you get used to it," one woman school bus driver told me. "The challenge is with the sixty kids. You must understand children to like this Job. Another An-other thing, we must realize we're not carrying cargo. We're carrying sixty lives. And they couldn't be replaced. (Fashion writer, artist, and TV personality, Miss Chapman is a native of Detroit and hat spent the last several years working with automobile stylists, design' er$ and engineers at Chrysler Corporation.) Today more than 29 per cent of all public school children ride the bus to school and many mothers are taking part in the program as drivers. In Rochester, Michigan, we interviewed four women who drive school buses part-time. 10 of IS Drivers Women Rochester, a small but growing grow-ing town, has 18 school buses, and ten of the drivers are women. wo-men. In the fall, they take a 12-hour 12-hour driver training course. They learn how to operate the buses, review the rules of the road, and brush up on child psychology. At the beginning of the season, the drivers are handed a map of their particular route and a list of the children's names. Kindergarteners Kinder-garteners are apt to be a problem, prob-lem, because they easily get lost. One driver told us the following tale: "One night I thought I had delivered all the children safely home. Then I discovered I had one more little passenger left, a boy about 6 years old. He forgot where to get off. When I asked him where he lived, he said 'I |