Look at the calendar! The first day of school will be here before you know it, and thousands of area children will be out the door on their way and the roads will be filled with big yellow school buses.

Due to the nature of my job, getting kids ready for school, I find I get a lot of questions from new parents, and one that makes them the most nervous is putting their little kindergartner on the bus. I remember that fear myself many years back, but like so many others I had to rely on public transportation to get my kids there.

When parents ask me if they should worry and what they should do, it has gone through my mind several times I wish they could meet Chelle Eby because if everybody could have a bus driver like Chelle, they wouldn’t worry. I am sure that there are a lot of Chelles out there. I just know my Chelle because for the past decade I have been seeing one of her three great kids in the Parents as Teachers program in Carthage. Chelle has driven a bus for the Carthage R-9 School District for the past 16 years and has run the same route for the past 13. I decided to go to her for her best advice for making safe and happy kids, parents and drivers.

“I love to hear parents tell students that the bus driver is the boss!” she said. “Sometimes the parents have different rules than the school system, not bad ones, but different ones. For example, the bus driver says stand at the bus stop and momma wants the student to stand at the front door so she can keep an eye on them. This conflicts with school-system and bus-driver’s instructions.”

Most districts will send home an information sheet with each rider within the first few days of school listing all the bus safety rules which must be signed and returned by the parents after they have reviewed them. The sheet must come back for the students to ride. The sheet goes over rules such as: the driver is in charge; remaining in your seat until the bus stops; keeping hands, arms and head as well as personal belongings inside the windows; talk quietly to your neighbor; and the loading and unloading danger zone. Carthage buses also practice emergency drills twice a year.

“It really helps when parents are backing you. Sometimes a note home from the driver or a note to the driver can make a world of difference,” said Chelle. “I often have parents who want to talk to me at the bus stop. Our standard answer is to have them call the bus barn and either schedule a face-to-face to talk or talk to our boss, Cathy Dunn, who is awesome. It always feels rude to tell parents this but I am on a time schedule, there are other students waiting on the bus to show up at a specific time and I am trying to stick to that schedule.”

I asked Chelle about bullying on the bus. Many parents worry about putting their kindergartners on the same bus with kids in high school.

“Bullying? I’d love to say no way, not on my bus! But the sad truth is that I am the only adult on the bus and every student sits behind me,” she said. “I cannot see everything that goes on. I do my very best to discourage that kind of behavior, and my personal standard is no tolerance when I catch it. In an effort to prevent bullying, I assign seats to every rider. The front half of the bus is all boys and the back half is girls. Kindergartners sit with other kindergartners, first-graders with other first-graders and so on.”

If other drivers on the road would allow those buses some extra room and time, it would make the drivers’ jobs much easier and students much safer. Remember that buses must stop at all railroad crossings and when the stop sign arm on a bus is out, the violation fee is $90.50 if you don’t stop.

“We have a great bunch of drivers right now at Carthage R-9 that make hundreds of snap decisions every minute while on the road, just as any other driver out there,” Chelle said. “The difference is that we have 83 darling little angels on board our 40-foot vehicles.”

Jane Drummond is a parent educator for the Carthage School District. Contact her at janedrummond@mchsi.com.