No nonsense, no accidents in 35 years driving Richland 1 school buses

Half a dozen high schoolers file onto Earlene Scott’s bus. Seven, eight, nine of them, now, wasting no time after the last afternoon bell rings at A.C. Flora High School.

The bus jiggles as each student steps on, backpacks slung over shoulders, earbuds hanging from their heads, cellphones in hand. They share seats in the four short rows on either side of the aisle, chattering about quizzes and piercings and birthdays.

The bus lurches from the school driveway and begins its long drive south through Lower Richland, the wheel in comfortable, capable hands.

Scott will get the students home safely, just as she has done for Richland 1 students for the past 35 years.

“(Parents) want their kids safe, just like I would with mine,” said Scott, 56. “They want their kids respected, and they want the driver to be trusted with their kids.”

Since September 1980, there has been no one more trustworthy to drive Richland 1 students. Scott has toted children all across the county and beyond without a single incident.

No wrecks, no fender-benders. No, not even a scuffle among students on the bus.

(Although, there was that one time, Scott recalled, when two brothers wanted to fight. She wouldn’t have it on her bus. But as soon as they stepped off – well, the little one went running away with the older one chasing after him, she remembered with a chuckle.)

In three decades, Scott has driven children at every level of schools, mostly in the Lower Richland area. She now carries fewer than a dozen students at a time to A.C. Flora from outside the school zone; they come specially for the school’s English for Speakers of Other Languages program.

Scott’s day starts when she wakes up around 3 a.m., comes into the Lower Richland transportation office around 4:15 a.m. and begins her morning bus route around 6:20 a.m.

By 8 a.m., she’s back in the office, where she works as a field trip coordinator, until she hits the road again about 2:15 p.m.

The students load up at at 3:15 p.m. at the school. By 4:30 p.m., her day is finally ending.

It’s a long day, but Scott prefers staying on the move to having a job that would keep her in an office all day.

Scott’s supervisors and peers know her for her spotless record, mentoring other drivers and her reliability.

She doesn’t know of any other drivers in the district who have driven as long as she has without any incidents, she said.

“I wish we had about 100 more (drivers) that could say they’ve gone for 35 years of service without incident,” Transportation Operations Manager Keith Terry said. “I’m sure that’s everyone’s dream, everyone’s hope for any industry.”

Scott’s students know her for her quiet, no-nonsense attitude.

“She’s a good driver,” said 17-year-old Vanesa Carmona, a junior at A.C. Flora who has ridden Scott’s bus since her freshman year.

She’s not a mean driver, Scott said – but she’s stern. And that reputation precedes her among students.

Once, she pulled her bus over alongside another bus stalled on the side of the road. The other driver was trying to calm down some rowdy kids. But when they saw Scott walk up, “All the kids got to hollering, ‘There come Mrs. Scott! Mrs. Scott’s coming! And she said you could hear a pin drop when they saw me,” Scott remembered.

“I tell everyone, ‘If you show respect, you’ll earn respect,’” Scott said. “I’m not a driver that holds a conversation, because a lot of times they feel like if you hold this big conversation with them and you’re doing all this laughing and talking ... they feel like, ‘OK, we can kind of get over on her.’ So I don’t do that.”

That’s because she has one job on her bus: to deliver her students to where they’re going – safely.

“I try to treat the children just as if they were my kids. That’s a respect you have to have,” Scott said. “And they are your kids while they’re on that bus. ... That’s just the way I handle it. They’re mine. Those are my kids.”

This story was originally published September 3, 2015 at 11:22 AM with the headline "No nonsense, no accidents in 35 years driving Richland 1 school buses."