The Long Riders : High Desert Students Face Even Slower School Bus Trips

Out in the high desert, where the power lines end and the curbs vanish, Jaye Ruiz drove a brand new school bus toward the sunrise. As traces of red began to appear over the hilly horizon, she passed a lone trailer, drove a few more feet to the “Entering San Bernardino County” sign, turned around and stopped.

Oscar Pineda, 17, and his sister, Dinora, 15, ran out, followed by three barking dogs. It was 5:30 a.m.--nearly two hours and about 20 stops before they would arrive at Antelope Valley High School in Lancaster, 25 miles away.

In good times and bad, generations of high desert students have had to adjust to the tedium of the longest school bus rides in the county. Yet they find ways to adapt.

They wake up before the chickens to get ready for school and then must endure a seemingly endless number of stops. Sometimes the buses are cold. Or crowded. Some use the time to sleep. Others do homework or apply makeup. Occasionally, the restless students dismantle seats to relieve the boredom.

The long-distance logistics make things others take for granted, such as after-school activities or jobs or getting an education, if not impossible, at least inconvenient.

And the inconvenience could become even worse if the Antelope Valley Union High School District and the other school districts in the area reduce their spending on transportation to help balance budgets. The area’s six school districts don’t operate buses themselves but rely on the Antelope Valley schools transportation agency.

Ken McCoy, who heads that agency, understands the dilemma that the districts face.

“Do we cut home-to-school transportation, jeopardizing the rural kid’s opportunity to get an education, or do we cancel trips to Disneyland and rides to football games?” McCoy asked.

The school districts last year began charging students $50 per semester to ride the bus, but the agency still has 26 fewer buses on the road this year than in 1991-92. Now it is considering reducing the salaries of drivers, who earn a maximum of $9.90 per hour for the part-time jobs. Some could be laid off. With fewer buses and drivers, it could take even longer for the 2,000 students that the agency transports to get to school.

“They will have to pack more kids on the bus, meaning the ride will be longer because they have to pick up more kids,” McCoy said.

The six-school Antelope Valley Union High School District serves the entire valley and, even if it had all the money it needed, the bus routes would be just as many miles long. At 1,700 square miles, the district is larger than Luxembourg or the state of Rhode Island.

Some of the students on Ruiz’s bus live in homes without running water. Others don’t have phones. And the Pineda family relies on a portable generator for electricity.

“It’s hard to imagine anyone living out here,” said bus driver Ruiz, who lives in Lancaster. “It’s so isolated.”

The students said that is the toughest part of growing up in the desert.

“You get lonely, so you just have to make do with what you have,” said Steve Henson, 15.

“And a lot of times, the people who have cars don’t want to drive all the way out here to take me home,” said Brian Escalante, 14.

Genia Bryan, 15, also complained about the distances. “If you want to go to a mall, you have to beg your mom for a ride,” she said.

Since the schools no longer offer driver’s education, students now have to pay as much as $189 to take a private course. That means many students can’t even look forward to being able to drive themselves when they turn 16.

But living away from the city also has some benefits.

“It’s quiet,” Escalante said. “You don’t have to worry about drive-by shootings. I’ve got friends around here.”

Still, there are the bus rides.

Once, he said, the unheated bus was so cold that he had to wear three jackets. “I used to bring a serape, and we would cuddle together in the back of the bus and go to sleep,” Escalante said.

Ruiz, who has been driving this route for the last nine months, said the door on her last bus didn’t seal properly. “So air came in,” she said. “The kids were miserable.”

Now she drives a new diesel bus, which the California Energy Commission furnished to the agency to study their efficiency.

As the bus traveled along the two-lane roads, the kids engaged in animated repartee, whacking each other on the hands, sharing cookies.

One girl sat by herself, looking out the window, lost in thought. Another did homework. After boarding the bus each student found a seat among friends, resuming conversations interrupted by the end of the previous day’s ride.

John Cantmill, 16, has complained to his parents about not being able to hang out with friends after school. “But my parents say they can’t do anything about it,” he said. “They don’t have time or gas to pick me up. It gets real expensive.”

“It’s hard for kids out here to get work, because we don’t have cars,” he said. “When we first moved here, I wanted to get to know the people at school. But now there are only a few people I associate with. I get my homework and chores done, and then there is nothing else to do.”

He said the ride to school in the morning is grueling. Returning isn’t so bad “because everybody is alive.”

The new bus has a nice speaker system, and Ruiz lets the students bring favorite tapes. On this trip, Sting was playing but the students weren’t really listening. One girl’s pink pet rat, which she was bringing to school for “show and tell,” darted up and down her shoulder. They finally arrived at Antelope Valley High at 7:10 a.m. At 2 p.m., Ruiz returned to pick up the 48 students for the trip back home.

She had opened all the windows to create a bit of a breeze in the baking sun and put in a cassette of the movie soundtrack to the “Wizard of Oz.” “I thought the kids would like that,” she said.

Some are carrying books and knapsacks when they climb back on but others are suspiciously empty-handed. Even though the afternoon sun beats down mercilessly, many of the students have jackets or sweaters they had worn to ward off the pre-dawn chill tied around their waists.

“Who picked this music?” yelled one of the riders.

“I thought you guys would like this,” said Ruiz. She quickly accommodates the restless students by putting in a tape of Nirvana, the hugely popular grunge rock band.

The students get to know each other well during the long rides.

Genia Bryan told her fellow riders that she was getting married in July, probably in a small ceremony, to “get out of the house.”

“She’s probably gonna go to the drive-through chapel in Las Vegas,” Brian Escalante said. “Oh, did you see that on Oprah?” Marcus Fear joked. The others joined in the laughter.

This is their second day riding on the new bus with the teal-blue seats and the new car smell.

Motioning over to two friends, Escalante proudly said, “We got assigned seats.”

That’s because, on the old bus, Escalante, Fear and Steve Henson whiled away the long hours on the road by using screwdrivers, socket sets and monkey wrenches to dismantle the seats.

“Somebody ratted on us,” Fear said. “So that’s why they put us in the front.”

The conversation turned to the “bouncers” at school, the security guards who patrol the halls. The next topic was the weekend rave dances in vacant warehouses.

Then they began to play the “pain game,” slapping each others’ hands as hard as they could until they could no longer stand the pain. Then they played “paper, rock, scissors.”

As they passed a lonely, last-stop mini-mart, the students explained that this was where a scene from “Terminator II” was filmed.

The bus gradually emptied out. Escalante and Fear jumped off at the same time, heading out past the sagebrush.

Genia Bryan headed toward the house she wants to get out of, where three dogs nervously pace.

The last ones to leave, Oscar and Dinora Pineda, got off and said goodby to Ruiz. They said they would do chores and homework, have dinner and, possibly, if it’s still light, play basketball with kids who live nearby. It’s 4:30 p.m.