You can’t win if you don’t enter
Editor’s note: This is one in a series of articles marking the 50th Anniversary of Hartselle City Schools.
Back in the day of the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes’ television commercials, Ed McMahon would remind us that “you can’t win if you don’t enter.” The statement is a simple one, but it is as true for schools as it was for any sweepstakes. The Alabama State Department of Education’s Attendance Matters campaign asserts that “attendance is eight times more predictive of failure than prior test scores” and that “attendance is a major, if not the biggest, factor impacting students behaviorally and academically.” Getting students to the schoolhouse has been a priority for Hartselle City Schools even when its schools were part of the Morgan County system. My dad, Robert Slate, actually drove a Morgan County school bus in 1957 when he was still in high school. I can hardly picture a time when the bus driver got off the bus with the rest of the students and went to class only to jump back on at the end of the school day and get everyone safely back home.
By 1975, students were no longer driving school buses, but getting students to school remained a priority. A Hartselle Enquirer article dated November 13 indicates that then-Superintendent Dr. Carlton Smith was concerned about the amount of time Hartselle’s children were spending on school buses or waiting at the schools for school buses to make afternoon drop-offs and then return for a second round of delivering students to their homes. “We cannot pick up some students at their schools until 3:30 to 3:45 in the day.” There was also some concern that the district could not safely transport student athletes to events or students to field trips designed to enrich their educa-tional experiences.
To remedy all of this, Smith and the school board purchased two school buses to add to the fleet of six. The 72-passenger buses each cost $13,500, and the mid-November purchase was going to enable the fledgling school system to get “all of the 1975 model safety features” at a “substantial savings” ahead of the 1976 model release.
At the time, the district also decided to hire a full time employee to provide continuous maintenance on the school buses in order to protect the investment in the buses and to protect the children riding in them.
Today, Hartselle City Schools maintains a fleet of 31 buses and employs 2 certified bus mechanics to protect the investment. Buses are no longer $13,500 each. Each costs about $150,000, with costs increasing annually.
But the priority remains the same getting students to and from school in order to provide them with a chance at future success. HCS Director of Operations Rocky Smith says, “Each day Hartselle City Schools’ school buses safely transport approximately 1,000 students over 27 routes throughout our city.
Bus drivers are the first and last school employees some students interact with each day. The mission of our transportation department is to support the education of each child placed in our care through safe and nurturing transportation practices. Our drivers do a wonderful job of taking care of each student and promoting the educational program.” Again, though some things have changed over the course of Hartselle’s fifty years as a school system, many remain the same. Getting students to school in order to give them a chance at a brighter future and then back home again is one of those constants.
The next time you have to brake for school buses loading or unloading their precious cargo, remember that the students on that bus are not actually on a trip. They are on a journey.
