The regular bus wasn’t full, so they didn’t randomly pick me and 3 other kids to be in the overflow bus. It was the literal short bus. I rode the short bus to school with the other autistic kids. How the hell did I get to 40 without realizing I was autistic? 😆
I’m a school bus driver. The short bus doesn’t mean anything. Some routes just don’t have that many kids and/or go through places where a larger bus wouldn’t be practical. I actually just got switched to a short bus because I was driving a large bus downtown to pick up 15 kids. Like… no.
That makes sense. Still, in my case, I think it was the autistic bus because even though we only had 4 kids in there, the bus driver had an assistant with him that would basically babysit us. They were pretty strict with rules, and we weren’t even allowed to talk to each other sometimes. The larger bus that picked up kids from the same neighborhood and had 20+ students in it did not have an assistant. Their rules were also much more relaxed.
It’s mindblowing that the school admins think they can segregate boys like that and impose all sorts of nonsensical rules on them specifically and then not have severe problems. This is why we have angry, bitter incels who fall in with bigoted extremists.
Ah. These days they just put the autistic kids on the regular bus and don’t bother to tell us or offer training in how to deal with them.
At least that’s what happened on one route I ran last year.
I’m not even sure how the driver would deal with that.
Kindness mostly. The kid mostly just liked to ask me my opinion on the most mundane things. Sometimes he’d try to block other kids from getting on the bus and I had to be firm about that, but as long as I told him whether I like peanut butter better than jam we were pals.