Patience at the wheel with boys on the bus

Marty Sharpe
Driving a school bus is not a job for everyone. It requires patience, restraint, understanding, firmness and a sense of humour.
And how many people have all of those qualities at 6.50am, five days a week in traffic with 50-odd teenagers sitting behind you?
Colin Cudd does.
With all the brouhaha over a boy who got expelled after taking a severed kitten's head on a Nimon school bus last Friday, we decided to board the bus yesterday to see what the kids get up to.
Colin, 66, is a "veteran" with 26 years behind the wheel of a school bus. He was driving the bus last Friday, but the first he heard about the kitten's head was when he got back to the Havelock North depot.
And having made the trip with him it's easy to see why. At that hour of the day the road is full of cars carrying children to school and footpaths are packed with walking children, many of whom cross the roads of Colin's route at whim.
Colin cannot afford to take his eyes off the road. He relies on the kids behind him to behave considerately and responsibly. And the vast majority of them do. They certainly did on the day I caught the bus, possibly because there were two extra adults on board (myself and a teacher, who boarded at Taits Drive), and possibly because the three ringleaders had been removed.
The boy in question, who was expelled from Hastings Boys High School, and two of his schoolmates had not been on the bus since Friday.
The Volvo B10 rolled out of the Havelock North depot at 6.50am. Our destination was Tait Road then a number of stops en route back to the Hastings schools.
It's a 58-seater bus but Colin's had 77 pupils on it. By law he's allowed up to 85. That's quite a few bodies for one bus driver to keep an eye on.
With all the pupils so well-behaved there was little else to do but have a yak.
Colin says kids haven't changed much over the years; they've always been prone to get up to mischief.
"It's still the same old story. When you get girls and boys together on a bus there's always going to be a bit of trouble," he says.
"Mostly they aren't that too bad. There are plenty of practical jokes, nothing serious."
He's been threatened by a kid with clenched fists, had orange peels hurled at him, and he's been sworn at more times than he cares to remember.
Foul-language is like water off a duck's back for Colin. He recites a bit of school bus vernacular, that won't be repeated here, just to prove the point. He's heard about some kids getting so bullied on the bus earlier this year that they have stopped using it.
If a pupil's action is bad enough Colin can ban pupils from using the bus for a week. He says he's done that about 15 times. Sometimes he's had to physically prevent barred pupils from boarding the bus.
"You soon figure out who the ringleaders are. It's not difficult. It's just so hard to catch them. You look at them in the mirror and they all look very innocent, as if nothing's going on - but you know there is," he says.
Some routes are worse than others for poor behaviour, with the one we're travelling regarded as one of the worst.
"The most they get out of a driver on this route is about 10 months. I think the kids broke the last driver," he says, quite seriously, his eyes on the road ahead.
Colin retired last September after a year on this route, but came back to drive it again earlier this year.
He says he does the job because he enjoys it. As we drive to Mangatahi Road from Bridge Pa and back again, he points to the countryside and says, "it's great out here. Different everyday. Never the same".
Pupils are picked up and dropped off along the way as we make our way to Hastings; some transfer to other buses, others alight at their schools. All up we travel 75km and provide transport to 62 pupils.
Many of the pupils thank Colin as they jump down the steps.
"Might be half of them if I'm lucky", he says when asked how many bother to thank him.
A nine-year-old sitting in the seat across from me asks me where I'm getting off, then asks if I'm going to be on the bus on the way home. When I say I might be, he smiles and says "cool".
The boy, who wants to be an artist (he likes drawing dragon claws), tells me he's never had any trouble on the bus, and he likes everything about the trip "except for the paying".
As he hopped down the steps it occurred to me what an important, and really rather thankless, job it is to be a bus driver.