Best Wheels on the Bus Music with regard to Kids in order to sing to find out British

Total travel time to and from Wheels on the bus: about 4 hours.



"The first day I went to school, I was like, do I really want to do this? " Freeman, eighteen, said. But the ride speedily became routine, and now Freeman doesn't hesitate to shoot down the notion of trading the two-hour trip to the science and technology magnet school for the 10 minutes it would take him so that his local high school.

It was once that students with the longest bus rides were those that have rural addresses. Today, however, more and more of the longest school bus commutes fit in with 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 one of those opportunities that comes to maybe a lucky few students. "

Sometimes the capacity of the trips that students are likely to endure even surprises adults.

"I'll explain when I felt it -- about that rare occasion when kids miss the bus, and Now i'm taking them home. I'm imagining, 'Wow, "' said Montgomery Blair High school Principal Phillip Gainous. Long commutes have grown to be routine at the Silver Spring senior high school, one of the largest within Montgomery and home to magnet programs in communications and scientific discipline that lure students from throughout the county.



School officials across the region strain to keep regular, in-boundary school bus rides under an hour. But that has no showing on magnet school commutes, which often easily stretch longer. Students learn to make the best of it: One recent morning, a number of Thomas Jefferson freshmen huddled around a little light clamped to a math textbook to examine for a test. Another student strummed a guitar. Still others dozed to music using their portable CD players.

Montgomery Blair once offered a friend program that gave far-flung students safe places to stay if the roads were tied up with bad weather or incidents. But the program died out from lack of use, Gainous mentioned. "We don't do that any longer, because the kids are so used to traveling or waiting in the school, " he said. "They merely sleep or do their groundwork. "

Grace Chung, a 15-year-old Thomas Jefferson sophomore, tries to squeeze using some study time on the shuttle. But she's seen far much more intricate maneuvers: A friend once made an entire poster for spirit week, including glitter, during the commute in order to school.

"She had her glue in addition to her glitter. She would pour it from the glue and then pour it back the jar -- I don't think she spilled a single section of glitter, " she said.

Grace's starting school is Chantilly. Like just about any traffic-hardened veteran, she separates the girl commuting time into "good traffic days" and "bad traffic days and nights. "

"Sometimes if traffic is really good, we get there with 8 a. m., " a vacation of about a half-hour, Leeway said. "And sometimes we make it right before the bell rings" from 8: 30. On a recent icy morning that spawned many car accidents and backups, Grace got to school at 9: 25.

She sees the positives. "You make a great deal of friends on the bus. I can take homework that I don't understand how to do and say, 'Here, assist me. ' There's some math whizzes about the bus. It's like study hallway. "

In Prince William County, 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 inside rural, western part of your county. The stars are still bright when Hogan gets about the bus each morning. He attends Stonewall Jackson Senior high school, near Manassas. Prince William is constructing a high school for western-area learners, but it won't open till 2004.

Until then, the kids just get used to the journey.