I was always interested in that, since small towns in America usually has very limited transport options , unlike suburbs of big cities. Especially those who are younger than 16 and don’t have driver’s license. Are there school buses for that cases, or the school buses are used generally only for elementary school? In Europe, they usually use train or bus ’cause there is high population density and many local lines.
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Buses, rides from parents, ride with older friends/ siblings.
To school, you take a school bus for all grades.
To larger towns, you get a ride with a parents or friend or you bike or walk. I know people who biked 10 to 15 miles to work as teens in rural New England. If you can’t get a ride, you don’t go.
Edit: added units.
There are school buses almost everywhere, including for high school students. We don’t expect children, including teenagers, to use public transportation to get to school.
My friend in NYC took a shared hired car for high school. She took the subway for middle school and walked to elementary school.
Out in the country my cousins took the bus or got rides from their parents or parents of kids who were in their school. Once the oldest had a driver’s license she took her siblings to school.
When I was 7, we lived in a semi-rural area. It was a 1.5 mile walk from our house to the main road where the school bus picked us up and then a 45 minute ride to school.
The bus driver was a cranky old lady who demanded absolute silence. If you talked or whispered, she would threaten to kick you off the bus for a week and make your parents drive you to/from school. With the distances involved, that was a serious threat.
Long ass bus ride
We had school buses that took us to school.
As for general trips to “town”, before I turned 16 if I needed something from town I had to get someone to take me. There is no intercity public transportation where I grew up, it was too rural. I lived in a small town next to a small city 15 minutes away that had the basics like groceries and tools. The nearest mall was an hour away and the nearest Wal-Mart was 30 minutes away until I was a teenager.
Public schools they have to bus you. The ride to school may be 45 min to an hour. They don’t pick you up from your house, but rather a set location where other kids will gather.
If private school, you can pay for a busing service, depending, or you drive your kids yourself.
Usually kids in the city are okay on public transportation, but depending on the location. At our school in inner Milwaukee, the school bus service was the safer option for the kids.
I went to high school in a tiny little town about 30 miles from the city I lived in (to study vocational agriculture). I took a school bus there along with the 8 other kids from my city who also went there.
Friends or a bus.
school buses. I took the school bus from ages 5 to 17.
Most schools have school buses for kids to use from Kindergarten to 12th grade. In my town there is public transportation but the kids still get school buses.
They ride the school bus or someone drives them. Transit doesn’t exist in my rural area.
In my small hometown I walked about a half mile to high school, until I got a girlfriend with a car.
My daughter went to private school; we drove her daily until she got a license to drive herself.
Even in rural areas there will be a school bus to take kids to public school.
When I was school age, we didn’t have buses. Heck we didn’t even have the color yellow. But I digress.
We had to walk 37.2 miles each way to school, up hill both ways, naturally. The snow was usually at least two feet deep in the summer, and up to 12 in the winter. That might sound bad, but no so much. See, we could tunnel through the snow to the school, and that tunnel would (mostly) protect us from predators for a few months. But come the spring thaw, that protection went away. And then came the age of wolves.
It wasn’t too bad in the beginning as our oldest brother, Zachariah, was a huge young man. 7 feet tall and as wide as the Calvinator. He could throw his hands up and roar like a bear and the wolves would flee the remains of our tunnel with their tails tucked between their legs. But then came that terrible day when he graduated and the rest of us younglings knew the horrible truth; we would have to face the wolves alone.
None of us were very big see, as Zachariah took all the food for himself. It was understandable, given his enormous size, but we’d try every now and then to swarm him and get an extra helping of crumbs. He would shake us off like a dog shaking off water, laughing all the while. Sadly he would die a couple of years after graduation from consumption. But I digress.
Given our small and undernourished stature, the remaining 17 of us would have to rely on speed, stealth and cunning to survive the trip. We were pretty bad at it in the beginning, having only ever relied on Zachariahs girth for safety. Abigail, Jebidiah and little Ezekiel went down in the first year. It was a terrible sad thing to witness. But I quickly came to realize that Zachariah had saved us yet again, as they were unable to keep up with their little malnourished legs.
Zachariah moved out the following year to the big city of Washington (Pop. 136). He did pretty well before his death, and would occasionally send us a bag of crumbs to share, from time to time. It helped us grow strong and improve our chances. Good old Zachariah, I miss him still. But, once again, I digress.
Annabelle graduated the next year, and we only lost one more to the wolves, Judah. No one mourned him though as he was quite the bad apple. I graduated the following year, but not before poor Ruthanne was taken by the pack. I probably shouldn’t have pushed her out of the way while we were fleeing. I carry her ghost still.
In all, 7 of us out of 18 survived to adulthood, and that’s pretty damn good by the standards of our time. You kids and your fancy, flashy yellow buses. They’re just making you weak, fattening you up for when the wolves come. You’ll see. You’ll see.
The schools hire a bus company to pick up students
They drive, their parents take them, or they ride the school bus. School buses are for all students who live a certain distance from the school who wish to use it, not just elementary schools.
school buses, public transit, or their parents drive them
I lived too far away for the school bus, so I had to drive myself. I got my hardship at 14.
School buses are very common and accessible. Otherwise, they drive, walk, or get driven.
In SD, they drive, starting at 14yrs 6mos.
Or get rides from an older sibling, neighbor, or commuting parent.
We have school busses. I live in a rural small town, I think half the school would be out by the lake every day if you let us get to school on our own with public transportation 😂 I know I would.
School buses are more common for middle and high school, since they tend to draw students from a wider radius than an elementary school. I lived in a suburban area, and pretty much everybody was walking distance to school for elementary school, but most took school buses for middle and high school.
In rural areas, students of all levels likely take school buses.
When I was a kid, all the kids would take a bus to the nearest elementary achool. Then all the middle and highschool kids would get on one bus that would take them to the county middle school and high school (they were located next to each other.)
School bus. Each year they rebuild and optimize the routes depending on who is enrolled.
My town did it by bus. That’s why snow days and delays were more common. A 3rd of our school population couldn’t get through on roads. If they’re old enough, they’ll usually have their own vehicle.
School buses are used pretty standard for all schooling from kindergarten through the end of high school. It is *not* limited to elementary school, and it is fairly normal for high schoolers to take the school bus. I actually took the school bus until I graduated high school at 19.
the only time schoolchildren will use trains or buses here is in large cities like New York City.
We do not expect teenagers to use public transit to get to school.
Universities are a different matter as American universities are generally an entire enclosed campus and offer their own on site housing for students in the form of dormitories, but even then some universities offer a bus route to the university from the surrounding towns. The university I am pursuing my doctorate at does this. Students at the university ride for free with their student ID being shown in lieu of bus fare, but anyone else in the community may use it if they wish, provided they pay bus fare.
When I lived in rural america, I would take the bus or run to school.
Hi, I grew up in a very remote area about 25 miles away from the nearest town with a school and a grocery store and stuff like that.
In the US public schools have to provide bus service for every student who needs it, so I rode the big yellow bus every day. Took about an hour each way, I was the first one on and the last one off since I lived further away than anyone else. Outside of that, I just didn’t go anywhere unless someone took me there. I had siblings though and a lot of forest and stuff to explore so it wasn’t as boring as you’d think.
I got my driver’s license and bought a cheap car literally the morning of my 16th birthday (as is very common for rural teenagers) and from there on out I just drove myself wherever I needed to go.
School buses generally service rural areas, but you may have to get up very early, and arrive home much later than most students, if you rely on it. You will also have a very hard time enjoying extracurricular activities after school unless you have a parent who can give you a ride home. Throughout my life growing up, during the times I rode the school bus, we would get up at around 5 AM, and return home around 5 PM.
Combined with the gutting of rural communities in general and especially of youth focused activities in them, this means the life of rural youth in America can be very deprived of the opportunities for learning and growth that urban children of the same class take for granted. In order to do high school wrestling and theater, I had to accept waiting for my family’s deliveries of produce in town to be done around 9 pm, and get home around 10:30 most nights. I was typically the last kid to leave school- in the winter, I would even bundle up extra tight and wait in the sheltered space between the inner and outer doors of the school, so the janitor could lock the inner doors and go home.
Then, when I moved to the city, I found that kids here have dozens of different martial arts to choose from, can learn any style or genre of dance or music from around the world, and have some two dozen community theater options to our two in my home town. I grew up playing and listening to Irish folk music, almost exclusively (I’m from an Irish family in a strongly Catholic, rural community), but when I moved to the city found that people much younger than me had a better grasp on it, because they had access to professional teachers whereas I was learning from scraps of knowledge by family members and by ear from albums and records. We didn’t even get semi reliable internet out our way until I was in high school.