My parents bought a school bus

When I was in High School, my parents bought a school bus.

In the 60's there were many desegregation initiatives one of these had to do with busing kids from one district to another to achieve a better mix of races in the schools. In our school this meant that many black students were brought in from schools that had been primarily black. Surprisingly, this was not a problem. We accepted them and got along as well as any teenagers can.

The problem was that any students who had traditionally transfered from smaller school districts to my school were no longer aloud to keeptransfering. We lived in a rural community that had done just that. We were all going to have to change to a school that was poor, not black, just poor.

My mother went to this new school and got a tour escorted by the principle. She wanted to see how stong their math and science department was. It was bad. The chemistry class had one lab table for the teacher, desks for the students. The physics class was shared with the Spanish class, and had a dusty pinata hanging from the ceiling. She opened a drawer of the teacher's desk and found an empty pint whiskey flask. Her boys were not going to this school!

After a number of meetings with our local school board, my parents, the school superintendant, and another concerned mother decided to make a trip to Austin, Texas, to talk to the State School Board. The lady that accompanied my parents on the trip to Austin was significant. She was a black woman, who also wanted her children to go to a good school. No doubt this helped convince the board that this was not a segregation issue.

The State decided that our community could continue to transfer to our school, but that we would have to provide our own transportation. Later the superintendant agreed to sell my parents a bus from their motor pool. This bus had been scheduled to be scrapped and was in bad shape but my dad and a close family friend worked nights overhauling it.

About twenty families in our community were represented in that bus. Those families owed a debt to my parents, but more so to our school, because the school sold us the bus for $10.