Knowing kids well aids driver
Published 9:00 pm Monday, February 9, 2004
LAKEWOOD — For 20 years, Debbie Sedy has hauled the community’s most precious resource along narrow two-lane county roads.
On her rural, often foggy bus route, she transports 60 children around the tricky contours of lakefront properties and up and down fir-lined streets with no sidewalks and little lighting.
She wakes up at 4:15 a.m. each day to board Bus 4, a 40-foot-long, 12-ton machine, by 6:30 a.m.
"Driving the bus — the actual vehicle — is just a small part of the job," said Marlene Rosenbach, the Lakewood School District’s transportation director. "The technical part of the job is easy."
The harder part is keeping tabs on each of the students on their good days and bad ones with your eyes monitoring the road and the mirrors while your back is to the passengers. It’s also memorizing each child’s schedule, what day they go home to child care or to grandma’s house and what cars belong in the driveway.
Sedy has strong student management skills, Rosenbach said. Last year, she handed out a small fraction of the 161 "bus conduct reports" drivers filled out for behavior ranging from eating and drinking to fighting and sticking body parts outside windows. In each instance the district contacted parents.
"Debbie is a skillful driver because she has high expectations," Rosenbach said. "That is, I think, the key. The students know how she expects them to behave."
Part of her success is her longevity on the same route. Sedy drives two routes to and from school each day covering kindergarten through high school. Many of her high school seniors she drove as kindergarteners.
Sedy lives in the district and students know that she knows many of their parents and will call on them if need be.
She seldom has to.
"Consistency is the biggest key," Sedy said. "I know if you tell a kid you are going to do something you want to make sure you do."
On a recent bus ride home, Sedy was as firm as she was cheerful with her elementary passengers who found their assigned seats. "Find your bus voices for me, please," she asked them before Bus 4 rolled out of the school parking lot.
Dozens of conversations drifted over the hum of the engine, from raising-your-hand surveys of who likes salads and chocolate chip cookies to who has a better compact disc player.
Sedy occasionally used her microphone for reminders to settle down but had a kind word for each child boarding or departing the bus.
Cody Gulle, a fifth-grader from English Crossing Elementary School, would occasionally look up from his Garfield comic book and share a strip he found particularly funny.
"I like riding the bus," he said.
Reporter Eric Stevick: 425-339-3446 or stevick@heraldnet.com.
