School Bus – Tues 9th June 2015

I’m going off kilter a bit tonight because I’ve been hit and kicked a bit after school and I don’t wish to dwell on this.  In situations like this, I have to get over it quickly and move on. I have but the tween concerned is still extremely cross with me.

Anyway…

When T was about 6 or 7 years old, we were already thinking about the most suitable secondary school for him.  We’d had experience of the nearest secondary school with C and foresaw that it wouldn’t be appropriate for T, fine for children who can just brush off instances but, for our T it wouldn’t be.

The school we had in mind is the one he now goes to.  It wasn’t without its setbacks, we had to appeal against a refusal of a place initially and then the stakes were high with 37 applicants for appeal and, in the end, only 6 were successful – one of them being T.

I had a little plan in my mind at the time (when T was 6 or so), he was going to go to that school and I would be driving him there, this was despite the fact I’m a non-driver.  I’d failed a previous driving test (primarily due to silly little mistakes and nerves) so set out to try again.

Unfortunately I couldn’t keep up the lessons, they’re not cheap and as I was giving up childminding, I needed to focus on feeding the family!  It all got a bit too much to deal with when we had to change primary schools for T, D headed into early puberty and something had to give.  So, I stopped lessons and felt extremely guilty about it, feeling that I’d already let T down because, even if we had manage to get T into the preferred secondary school, he’d have to get there by school bus.

Which he has been.  Since September.

And it’s gone smoother than we had anticipated.  He sets off at 7.45am every morning to catch that school bus.  It’s very rarely on time, which annoys him because if the timetable says it will be there at a certain time, then it should!  We know he gets there every day because he has received 100% attendance stickers every half term and I honestly don’t think it would occur to him to do anything else other than go to school, because that’s what’s expected of him.

But the best thing is something he said to me last week as we were walking home, D skipping happily just a few steps ahead:

“Mum, even if you could drive, I wouldn’t want you to drive me to school, I’d still want to go on the bus and sit with my friends”

Isn’t that great and a typically T honest statement, with a kind-of back-handed compliment.  D and I wait at the stop every afternoon (as it’s opposite her school), we watch for his school bus and he’s always in more-or-less the same place, one or two seats behind the driver, chatting to his friend.

We’ve got six weeks or so until the end of term, nearly the end of year 7, his first school year and the journey was one of the things that I was most worried about (there is a particular very stern glare that manifests if T disapproves of someone being too loud etc, so I was dreading any potential consequences if he glared at someone who didn’t like it) so I’m very very relieved that it’s all going okay.

That and the fact he’s settled in so well at secondary school have to be our ongoing #SSAmazingAchievements.

(Obviously this means the pressure is off ATM to get the driving nailed down for me, I’ll get there, sometime …)

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