Total travel time for you to and from Wheels on the bus go round and round: about four hours.
"The first day I went to school, I was like, do I want to do this? " Freeman, eighteen, said. But the ride easily became routine, and now Freeman doesn't hesitate to shoot down the notion of trading the two-hour day at the science and technology magnet school for the 10 minutes it would take him to access his local high school.
It was once that students with the longest bus rides were those with rural addresses. Today, however, more and more of the longest school bus commutes belong to suburban students, willing to put in the time so that you can attend a prestigious magnet school.
"Oh, I think it's worth every penny, " said Freeman, a mature at Thomas Jefferson. "I'm very happy at this school. It's some of those opportunities that comes to maybe a lucky few students. "
Sometimes along the trips that students are likely to endure even surprises adults.
"I'll tell you when I felt it -- with that rare occasion when little ones miss the bus, and I am just taking them home. I'm thinking, 'Wow, "' said Montgomery Blair Senior high school Principal Phillip Gainous. Long commutes have grown to be routine at the Silver Spring secondary school, one of the largest with Montgomery and home to magnet programs in communications and technology that lure students from along the county.
School officials across the region strain to keep regular, in-boundary school bus rides under 1 hour. But that has no showing on magnet school commutes, which easily stretch longer. Students learn to make the best of the item: One recent morning, a band of Thomas Jefferson freshmen huddled around a tiny light clamped to a math textbook to analyze for a test. Another scholar strummed a guitar. Still others dozed to music using their portable CD players.
Montgomery Blair once offered a buddy program that gave far-flung students safe places to stay if the roads were tied up with bad weather or mishaps. But the program died out of lack of use, Gainous explained. "We don't do that any longer, because the kids are accustomed to traveling or waiting in the school, " he said. "They only sleep or do their study. "
Grace Chung, a 15-year-old Thomas Jefferson sophomore, tries to squeeze in a few study time on the coach. But she's seen far a lot more intricate maneuvers: A friend once made a full poster for spirit week, filled with glitter, during the commute for you to school.
"She had her glue along with her glitter. She would pour it out on the glue and then pour it the government financial aid the jar -- I don't think she spilled a single section of glitter, " she said.
Grace's starting school is Chantilly. Like any kind of traffic-hardened veteran, she separates the woman's commuting time into "good traffic days" and "bad traffic times. "
"Sometimes if traffic is really good, we get there from 8 a. m., " an outing of about a half-hour, Sophistication said. "And sometimes we make it happen right before the bell rings" with 8: 30. On a recent icy morning that spawned lots of car accidents and backups, Grace managed to get to school at 9: 30.
She sees the positives. "You make a lot of friends on the bus. I can take homework that I don't discover how to do and say, 'Here, assist me. ' There's some math whizzes on the bus. It's like study corridor. "
In Prince William Local, 18-year-old Alan Hogan's hour-long bus ride is more like those of old: No magnet school, he just lives inside the rural, western part of the particular county. The stars are still bright when Hogan gets about the bus each morning. He attends Stonewall Jackson High school, near Manassas. Prince William is building a high school for western-area college students, but it won't open until finally 2004.
Until then, the kids just get accustomed to the journey.
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