Finest Wheels on the Bus Track with regard to Kids to be able to sing to master British

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



"The first day I went along to school, I was like, do I really 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 day at the science and technology magnet school for your 10 minutes it would take him to access 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 remain in suburban students, willing to put in the time so as to attend a prestigious magnet university.

"Oh, I think it's worthwhile, " said Freeman, a elderly at Thomas Jefferson. "I'm very happy at this school. It's some of those opportunities that comes to maybe a lucky few students. "

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

"I'll show you when I felt it -- upon that rare occasion when children miss the bus, and Now i'm taking them home. I'm imagining, 'Wow, "' said Montgomery Blair Senior high school Principal Phillip Gainous. Long commutes are becoming routine at the Silver Spring high school graduation, one of the largest inside 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 or so. But that has no bearing on magnet school commutes, which easily stretch longer. Students figure out how to make the best of that: One recent morning, a gang of Thomas Jefferson freshmen huddled around a little light clamped to a math textbook to check for a test. Another college student strummed a guitar. Still others dozed to music off their portable CD players.

Montgomery Blair once offered a friend program that gave far-flung students safe places to remain if the roads were tied up with bad weather or damages. But the program died 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 sleep or do their study. "

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

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

Grace's foundation school is Chantilly. Like just about any traffic-hardened veteran, she separates your ex commuting time into "good targeted traffic days" and "bad traffic nights. "

"Sometimes if traffic is actually good, we get there at 8 a. m., " a vacation of about a half-hour, Elegance said. "And sometimes we reach one's destination right before the bell rings" in 8: 30. On a recent icy morning that spawned many car accidents and backups, Grace made it to school at 9: 30.

She sees the positives. "You make a great deal of friends on the bus. I can take homework that I don't realize how to do and say, 'Here, aid 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 similar to those of old: No magnetic field school, he just lives inside the rural, western part of the particular 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 constructing a high school for western-area students, but it won't open until 2004.

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