A group of 11th-grade students from Boston took an unconventional bus ride last week when a party bus with neon lights and a stripper pole was used for their field trip! The Brooke Charter School in Boston was forced to hire a party bus due to the ongoing nationwide shortage of bus drivers which has significantly worsened during the pandemic.
Jim Mayers, AP Language & Composition teacher, wrote about the incident on Twitter: “Due to the national school bus driver shortage, my school has hired a party bus with stripper poles to transport us for a field trip. this is not a drill”.
The teacher explained that they had initially arranged for a regular bus for this field trip but when this one fell through, the school had to find another solution in order to avoid canceling the trip: “When you promise hundreds of kids a fun day with their advisories, you make it happen”. As reported by patch, the 11th-grade students didn’t really care about the bus, focusing on the field trip instead which was a “phenomenal experience”.
The tweet made headlines and Jim Mayers decided to delete it after being bombarded by journalists that wanted to cover the story. As he explained at a later post, he got messages from other teachers saying that it is common for party busses to be used to transport high school students, especially for events like prom.
a note about the tweet: pic.twitter.com/ZQTiOZbZLv
— Jim Mayers (@mayersteach) September 20, 2021
In his last post, Mayers asks the media to investigate the larger story, which will “help the public understand the many challenges educators and operations staff face on a daily basis, especially in the wake of the pandemic and the impacts of remote instruction”. The teacher also encouraged anyone who read his post to “attend their next local school board meeting or to pick up one of the many fantastic books about education” urging for people to take action in this serious issue.
Note: Stock school bus images are unrelated to the story
