Riding Bus #99

For one of the "get to know your community" activities on the final rubric, I decided to take a ride on a school bus after school. I brought this idea up at our PDS collaboration meeting last week. The principals thought it was a great idea and said they would make all arrangements. They only question they had was what bus I wanted to ride. Before this meeting I had done some research and decided that I wanted to ride bus #99. This bus travels to the lower income area in Bridgeport and has many students with behavior issues who ride it. I told the administration that I would like to ride this particular us and everyone in the room literally laughed at me. They said that this bus was rough and they high discouraged it. I brought up the fact that this bus heads to the lower income area of our school. Everyone agreed that it would be good for me to see. So the assistant principal set it  and yesterday I rode bus 99! When I got on the bus the bus driver greeted each student and sat them down in seats. Then she told the kids the rules; sit in your seat, if you put down a window you need to put it up before you leave, no loud voices, and no food. After we went to the middle and high school and the bus driver did the same things; greeting them, seating them, and rules. The bus driver began her route and only had to talk to children about 5 times. As I was looking around the bus I did not see much misbehavior. As I looked out the window I was expecting to see horrible leaving conditions, because of what everyone warned me about. What I saw was apartment buildings, houses, and mobile homes. I was kind of confused as to why everyone was making it a huge deal. When I arrived back to the school my principal stopped and asked how it went and I told her exactly what I saw. She responded with "isn't that horrible?" I think I had to pick my jaw off the floor. To me, those weren't awful living conditions. This puzzled me all night. Finally it hit me. My PDS has an extremely high SES... So to the people that have never seen horrible living conditions apartments and mobile homes probably look terrible. It made me see how people really think in that school. I grew up in a low SES school and some of my classmates had no running water. I just think that to really see where students are living you have to go back through off the road to see the true conditions.