Total travel time for it to and from Wheels on the bus go round and round: about some hours.
"The first day I went to school, I was like, do I actually want to do this? " Freeman, 16, 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 with the 10 minutes it would take him to access his local high school.
It used to be that students with the longest bus rides were individuals with rural addresses. Today, however, a growing number of of the longest school bus commutes are part of suburban students, willing to put in the time as a way to attend a prestigious magnet university.
"Oh, I think it's worth every penny, " said Freeman, a senior citizen 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 size of the trips that students are willing to endure even surprises adults.
"I'll inform you when I felt it -- with that rare occasion when young children miss the bus, and Now i'm taking them home. I'm contemplating, 'Wow, "' said Montgomery Blair High school graduation Principal Phillip Gainous. Long commutes are getting to be routine at the Silver Spring school, one of the largest within Montgomery and home to magnet programs in communications and research that lure students from over the county.
School officials across the region strain to keep regular, in-boundary school bus rides under an hour. But that has no bearing on magnet school commutes, which easily stretch longer. Students learn how to make the best of this: One recent morning, a band of Thomas Jefferson freshmen huddled around a smallish light clamped to a math textbook to study for a test. Another pupil strummed a guitar. Still others dozed to music using their portable CD players.
Montgomery Blair once offered a pal program that gave far-flung students safe places to settle if the roads were tied up with bad weather or mishaps. But the program died out from lack of use, Gainous stated. "We don't do that ever again, because the kids are accustomed to traveling or waiting for the school, " he said. "They just sleep or do their research. "
Grace Chung, a 15-year-old Thomas Jefferson sophomore, tries to squeeze in some study time on the tour bus. But she's seen far additional intricate maneuvers: A friend once made a whole poster for spirit week, filled with glitter, during the commute to help school.
"She had her glue and her glitter. She would pour it from the glue and then pour it back in the jar -- I don't think she spilled a single piece of glitter, " she said.
Grace's base school is Chantilly. Like any kind of traffic-hardened veteran, she separates her commuting time into "good targeted visitors days" and "bad traffic days to weeks. "
"Sometimes if traffic is actually good, we get there at 8 a. m., " an outing of about a half-hour, Acceptance 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 achieved it to school at 9: thirty.
She sees the positives. "You make lots of friends on the bus. I can take homework that I don't understand how to do and say, 'Here, help me. ' There's some math whizzes within 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 school, he just lives inside the rural, western part of the 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 developing a high school for western-area students, but it won't open right up until 2004.
Until then, the kids just become accustomed to the journey.
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