Total travel the perfect time to and from Wheels on the bus: about some hours.
"The first day I attended school, I was like, do I really need to do this? " Freeman, 18, 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 go to his local high school.
It used to be that students with the longest bus rides were those that have rural addresses. Today, however, increasingly more of the longest school bus commutes belong to suburban students, willing to put in the time in order to attend a prestigious magnet university.
"Oh, I think it's worth it, " said Freeman, a senior 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 the length of the trips that students are likely to endure even surprises adults.
"I'll inform you when I felt it -- upon that rare occasion when little ones miss the bus, and I am just taking them home. I'm pondering, 'Wow, "' said Montgomery Blair High school Principal Phillip Gainous. Long commutes have grown routine at the Silver Spring senior high school, one of the largest inside Montgomery and home to magnet programs in communications and scientific discipline that lure students from across the county.
School officials across the region strain to keep regular, in-boundary school bus rides under an hour. But that has no having on magnet school commutes, which easily stretch longer. Students learn to make the best of the idea: One recent morning, a selection of Thomas Jefferson freshmen huddled around a tiny light clamped to a math textbook to examine for a test. Another college student strummed a guitar. Still others dozed to music from their portable CD players.
Montgomery Blair once offered a pal program that gave far-flung students safe places to keep 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 any more, because the kids are very much accustomed to traveling or waiting at the school, " he said. "They just sleep or do their groundwork. "
Grace Chung, a 15-year-old Thomas Jefferson sophomore, tries to squeeze in some study time on the bus. But she's seen far far more intricate maneuvers: A friend once made a full poster for spirit week, full of glitter, during the commute to school.
"She had her glue in addition to her glitter. She would pour it on the glue and then pour it in the jar -- I don't think she spilled a single section of glitter, " she said.
Grace's bottom school is Chantilly. Like any kind of traffic-hardened veteran, she separates your ex commuting time into "good visitors days" and "bad traffic days to weeks. "
"Sometimes if traffic is absolutely good, we get there from 8 a. m., " vacation of about a half-hour, Leeway said. "And sometimes we make it right before the bell rings" at 8: 30. On a recent icy morning that spawned a multitude of car accidents and backups, Grace got to school at 9: thirty.
She sees the positives. "You make many friends on the bus. I can take homework that I don't discover how to do and say, 'Here, help me. ' There's some math whizzes about the bus. It's like study hallway. "
In Prince William Nation, 18-year-old Alan Hogan's hour-long bus ride is a lot more like those of old: No magnetic field school, he just lives in the rural, western part of the county. The stars are still bright when Hogan gets for the bus each morning. He attends Stonewall Jackson High school, near Manassas. Prince William is developing a high school for western-area learners, but it won't open right up until 2004.
Until then, the kids just get used to the journey.
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