BY CLIFF SMELLEY
The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round.
Bradford County’s school bus wheels will still go round and round after the Christmas/New Year’s break, but the school district’s transportation department will look different with Director Louette Smith’s retirement.
Smith, whose last day will be Friday, Dec. 19, has worked for the Bradford district for almost 40 years. She began as a substitute bus driver in the last 1980s and became a full-time driver before eventually moving into the administrative roles of assistant director and director.
It’s difficult for Smith to give you exact dates on when she filled each role. She said, “I just moved from one to the other and kept going. My whole career has been in transportation.”
She laughed and said she’d been around “forever.” Why not make it forever, though, when you find something you love doing? As Smith put it, driving and working with school buses made her feel right at home. She said she spent a lot of time on buses as a student-athlete. Plus, there’s the fact that her mother, Carroll “Johnnie” Johns was a school bus driver.
It may seem like Smith followed in her mother’s footsteps, but it was really another person who gets the credit for her start driving a bus — Willie Williams, who was Smith’s driver when she was a child.
“We were out picking peas at my mama’s,” Smith remembered. “She said, ‘You need to come be my sub bus driver.’”
Learning to drive a bus wasn’t that difficult for Smith, who grew up on a farm and was involved with horses.
“I’ve pulled horse trailers and drove big trucks my whole life,” she said. “I learned how to pull a horse trailer at 16.”
She felt comfortable behind the wheel and was certainly comfortable working in Bradford County.
“I’ve lived here my whole life,” Smith said. “I know everybody practically.”
Moving parts, kids
It would seem that Smith was destined to fill the transportation director’s role eventually because of the knowledge she obtained.
“I trained like five administrators above me,” she said. “I would train them to do the job.”
That job requires coordinating many things.
“I got to where I knew the routes, the buses, the bus drivers and where everybody was and everything,” Smith said. “That’s always challenging — just all the moving parts.”
Smith didn’t have to move into administration to get a lot on her plate. That comes with driving a bus as well.
“We usually get 60 (children), and we get to see them in a little mirror,” Smith said. “We have to watch the traffic and everything else. It’s a hard job. A very stressful job.”
Smith said when she was a driver, she would always stand and greet the children as they got on the bus. She’d tell them to have a good day as they got off.
“I always tried to stay positive with them,” she said.
If any children were “acting up,” Smith said she’d have them sit at the front of the bus. They’d remain there for a day or two and then get to go back to wherever they wanted to sit. Smith said whatever they had done was forgotten.
“They’re kids,” she said. “They’re going to mess up.”
The safety of kids is a driver’s utmost concern.
“Most of the bus drivers are not here because they’re getting a whole lot of money,” Smith said. “They’re doing it for the love of the children.”
A big part of keeping children safe is the driver being able to concentrate. Think of it as a parent telling children in the backseat to be quiet during a road trip. It’s the same thing in a bus, except the bus is a much larger vehicle filled with a lot more children.
“You have to yell,” Smith said. “There are 60 kids on the bus. The ones in the back are talking. If you talk in a normal voice, they’re not going to hear you.”
Smith said there have been instances where a child in the front of a bus thought a driver was specifically yelling at him or her. The child will go home and tell the parents. Sometimes, that would result in parents calling the transportation department.
“I’ll have parents call me saying, ‘They were yelling at my kids,’” Smith said, adding, “I have to explain that to parents all the time. You know, it’s really not your child. We’re just trying to get the bus to calm down and to reach the kids in the back.”
All it takes is having to take your eyes off the road for one second to find yourself in a situation that you don’t have enough time to react to, such as a vehicle that has pulled out right in front of the bus.
“It’s scary, and people just don’t care,” Smith said. “They’re always in a hurry.”
Smith said she quit driving a motorcycle because she’s been to too many accidents where people have driven their vehicles up under a bus, only to claim they didn’t see it.
“If they can’t see that big, yellow bus with flashing lights, they sure can’t see my motorcycle,” Smith said.
As you would imagine, a school district’s transportation director never wants to get the call that a bus has been involved in an accident. Another dreaded call is that a student has turned up missing.
“I go in panic mode,” Smith said of hearing a child is unaccounted for. “I’ve actually been home and gotten a phone call and turned around and came all the way back up here to pull video tapes off of buses to see if (the child) got off at a certain stop.”
Fortunately, a missing child is oftentimes at the school.
“A lot of times it’s a club that they do once a month and the parent will forget that their kid stayed after,” Smith said.
Farm and family
Smith has been experiencing a full-circle moment leading up to her retirement, saying, “I’ve been driving again for about a month or two months now because one of our drivers is sick. I’ve enjoyed it.”
She’s ready, though, to spend more time with her family. The importance of that really sunk in with the death of Edwin Johns in November 2023. Johns was her stepfather, though he was really the only father she knew. She lost her biological father, Dick Smith, when she was an infant.
“I lost my daddy two years ago,” Smith said of Johns. “I realized it was time to do something (else).”
Retirement won’t just give her more family time; it’ll also give her more farm time.
“I grow stuff, and I have a bunch of animals,” Smith said.
Some of those animals are horses, which she has been riding all her life. In fact, when fellow school district employee Robin Witt asked Smith what she was going to do in retirement, the response was, “I’m going to ride horses every day, Robin, while you’re working.”
Smith even teased Witt by suggesting that she’d call her every day and tell her what she was doing while Witt was working.
“I have a bus driver who retired, and that’s what she does,” Smith said. “She calls me every day and tells me she’s riding (horses).”
As Smith pondered the next chapter of her life, she said that what she’ll miss most is the people she worked with.
“I stayed here so long because I have some good employees,” Smith said. “I have some great, great employees. They made this job easier.”
