Boarding the school bus

Abstract

EVERY DAY DURING THE SCHOOL TERM, several thousand buses travel along country roads once marked with distinctive dark yellow bus route signs (now fluorescent green), carrying more than 100,000 pupils to school in the morning and returning them home again in the late afternoon,' Since their inception more than 80 years ago, school buses have changed the educational and social landscapes of rural New Zealand. As with many innovations in education, the service was initiated largely in an effort to save money; part of a process referred to as school consolidation. Before the first buses rolled down the driveway of the first consolidated school at Piopio in the South Waikato on 1 April 1924. the merits of consolidation had been debated in educational and community circles for nearly a decade. Its implementation would bring enormous change to the lives of rural children and their experience of school.