School bus
A school bus (plural, school busses) are motor vehicles used to transport students to and from school. In Canada and the United States they are almost uniformly painted a bright yellow color (often referred to as "school bus yellow") for purposes of visibility and safety. Most used in recent years have been diesel-powered. Full-size school buses can seat forty-five to seventy passengers or even more, but in many districts smaller vehicles are used as well. Some U.S. school districts purchase the buses and hire their own drivers, while others engage the service of contractors to form this function. School buses in the UK in almost all cases are contracted out to local bus companies.
Early school buses primarily served rural areas where it was deemed impractical for the young students to walk the distances necessary to get back and for from school on their own, and were sometimes no more than a truck with perhaps a tarpolin stretched over the truck bed. In the southern U.S. especially, school buses were used during the era of segregation to transport Black students to all-Black schools, which were often in only one or two locations within a county or other school district.
Following World War II, there was a nationwide movement in the U.S. to consolidate schools into fewer and larger ones. This meant that fewer students were attending school in their immediate neighborhood, particularly as they progressed into high school. This led in turn to a large increase in the demand for school buses. After the United States Supreme Court ruled in the case of Brown v. Board of Education that school and other segregation was tatamount to an unconstitutional violation of rights granted to all citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment, school buses were often used to transport students reassigned to different schools to promote racial desegregation. Opponents of this concept began to decry the practice as forced busing.
Modern school buses are often well equipped with amenities lacking only a few years ago such as air conditioning, two-way radios, and wheelchair lifts (typically those with lifts are shorter than their counterparts and are sometimes exclusively assigned to carry disabled children), but very few have seat belts, a standard safety feature in almost every other form of motorized transit. Whether this should be changed remains very controversial.
External links
- School Bus explorer (http://www.busexplorer.com/Sindex.html) website with numerous pictures of various school bus from different manufacturers and eras.