At first, the winter weather was fun.
Stevenson-Carson School District Superintendent Karen Douglass thought she could brighten up the drab, robotic voice messages alerting parents to changed bus routes and two-hour delays, so she recorded herself reading a poem about the announcements. Then, she had bus drivers in the district sing a reworked “Wheels on the Bus.”
And so parents in the Columbia River Gorge-based district heard the upbeat — slightly pitchy — message from the school letting them know that:
“The wheels on the bus go ’round and ’round all on snow routes
The tires on the bus are all chained up, all chained up, all chained up
The tires on the bus are all chained up/ Thank you, bus drivers”
“It was just a way to lighten the mood,” Douglass said. “We heard the parents loved it and were playing the messages for their kids.”
As the weather turned worse, the messages went back to their more serious tone. The district was hit with plenty of snow and especially hard with wind and ice. Students missed 11 days of school, and Douglass said families in the district lost power at their homes for at least a day, and some as many as four or five days.
“It was devastating up here,” Douglass said. “The weather wasn’t fun anymore.”
But even with the more serious weather announcements, there is still a light tone around bus routes in the district, as each route is named after a vegetable. Students know which bus to take thanks to a picture of that route’s vegetable on the bus near the door. So when the district sends out notices about those routes, it’s not uncommon to see something like “Corn — severe snow route.”
“Three years ago, all of our bus routes were fruit names,” Douglass said. “Over the summer, we wanted to shorten the rides for some students and balance the bus ridership. There was quite a shift in our routes. If we kept the fruit names, we were worried some students would think the Orange bus route now was still the same as the old Orange route.”
The district uses food items instead of bus numbers in case there’s a need for a new bus or replacement bus. Douglass said it’s more for younger students in the K-12 district. Instead of looking for a number, they know to look for one of the six vegetable routes: pepper, cucumber, potato, carrot, eggplant and corn.
And yes, Douglass knows eggplant is technically considered a fruit.
“A lot of people consider it a vegetable,” she said. “Being of academia, we want to point that out. There is some learning to be had.”
