Total travel time for it to and from Wheels on the bus go round and round: about several hours.
"The first day I went to school, I was like, do I want to do this? " Freeman, 17, said. But the ride easily became routine, and now Freeman doesn't hesitate to shoot down the notion of trading the two-hour holiday to the science and technology magnet school for that 10 minutes it would take him to get at his local high school.
It once was that students with the longest bus rides were those with rural addresses. Today, however, a growing number of of the longest school bus commutes are part of suburban students, willing to put in the time in order to attend a prestigious magnet school.
"Oh, I think it's worth every penny, " said Freeman, a senior citizen at Thomas Jefferson. "I'm very happy at this school. It's a type of opportunities that comes to maybe a lucky few students. "
Sometimes along the trips that students are going to endure even surprises adults.
"I'll let you know when I felt it -- about that rare occasion when kids miss the bus, and Now i am taking them home. I'm contemplating, 'Wow, "' said Montgomery Blair Secondary school Principal Phillip Gainous. Long commutes have become routine at the Silver Spring secondary school, one of the largest with Montgomery and home to magnet programs in communications and science that lure students from across the county.
School officials across the region strain to keep regular, in-boundary school bus rides under 1 hour. But that has no keeping on magnet school commutes, which in turn easily stretch longer. Students learn to make the best of the idea: One recent morning, a number of Thomas Jefferson freshmen huddled around a smallish light clamped to a math textbook to analyze for a test. Another pupil strummed a guitar. Still others dozed to music using their company portable CD players.
Montgomery Blair once offered somebody program that gave far-flung students safe places to settle if the roads were tied up with bad weather or mishaps. But the program died out from lack of use, Gainous said. "We don't do that nowadays, because the kids are so used to traveling or waiting at the school, " he said. "They simply just sleep or do their research. "
Grace Chung, a 15-year-old Thomas Jefferson sophomore, tries to squeeze in some study time on the shuttle bus. But she's seen far much more intricate maneuvers: A friend once made a total poster for spirit week, including glitter, during the commute in order to school.
"She had her glue as well as her glitter. She would pour it on the glue and then pour it back in the jar -- I don't think she spilled a single part of glitter, " she said.
Grace's starting school is Chantilly. Like just about any traffic-hardened veteran, she separates your ex commuting time into "good site visitors days" and "bad traffic times. "
"Sometimes if traffic is actually good, we get there on 8 a. m., " a vacation of about a half-hour, Elegance said. "And sometimes we make it right before the bell rings" with 8: 30. On a recent icy morning that spawned lots of car accidents and backups, Grace caused it to be to school at 9: thirty.
She sees the positives. "You make many friends on the bus. I can take homework that I don't know how to do and say, 'Here, support me. ' There's some math whizzes on the bus. It's like study corridor. "
In Prince William County, 18-year-old Alan Hogan's hour-long bus ride is a lot more like those of old: No magnet school, he just lives within the rural, western part of this county. The stars are still bright when Hogan gets around the bus each morning. He attends Stonewall Jackson High school, near Manassas. Prince William is developing a high school for western-area pupils, but it won't open until finally 2004.
Until then, the kids just get accustomed to the journey.
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