The 3,000-Mile Field Trip

By Tanya Walters, Los Angeles, California

As appeared in

I'm a school bus driver. I'm up before the sun, getting kids where they need to go in inner-city Los Angeles—to magnet schools, remedial schools and everything in between. The world boards my bus—college-bound immigrants, strutting football players. Then there are the kids I call the 2-Live-Crews —angry trouble-makers. Their parents are mostly missing and they live in a world of gangs, drugs and grownups whose only interest in them is the money they might spend on rap music and one-hundred-dollar sneakers. On the bus, though, it's my rules: "No getting up, no acting up. Period." I run a tight ship. 

On June 22, I filled a bus with 22 teens, some from the projects, and headed out from an intersection two miles from where the 1992 L.A. riots started. I didn't drive to school. We turned onto the interstate, aiming for a new destination—all the way across the U.S. Sound crazy? Stay with me a minute. 

I became a bus driver by accident. In high school I was a lot like the kids I drive now, getting by with Cs and Ds. One of my girlfriends invited me to take a test with her to become a school bus driver. "It's a good job," she said. Job? I didn't need a job. I took the test anyway and passed. When I graduated, I drove a bus. I was 19, not much older than my students, and they bullied me. Sometimes I wanted to quit. But my dad always said, "Tanya, get a job with benefits." Working for the Los Angeles Unified School District, I had health insurance and a pension. And money for my real passion—travel. 

You see, Mom died when I was six. I got passed between my aunt and my dad. Wherever I lived, though, I always went to summer camp and visited relatives on the East Coast. Seeing those faraway places—Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Louisiana—I realized the world was much bigger than south L.A. I spent some of my first paychecks on plane tickets. In the beginning I went by myself. Then with my godchildren, the son and daughter of a girlfriend from high school. I was young and naïve—I even had to look up the word godparent. But when I learned my responsibilities, I decided one thing I could do: expose the kids to life beyond L.A. I found travel deals and took them to Boston, New York, Phoenix. Soon their friends asked if they could come. Weekends became trips to Magic Mountain, museums, new cities. The trips were educational. I made the kids budget their money and took them to stores to show them how to dress for work. 

One day, corralling yet another group of 2-Live-Crews, I decided the kids on my bus needed more than discipline. They needed what my godchildren had—a grownup spending time with them, modeling good behavior, widening their horizons. They needed to travel. 

So I planned a trip. I knew how to drive a bus. And I knew how to travel with kids. I announced one morning that any student who completed an essay explaining why they wanted to go could join me on the road to San Francisco. Some kids laughed. But others wrote essays, and when they returned from our trip, the stories they told got around. I tried some longer trips, and by summer I had a small non-profit called Godparents Youth Organization, a few local sponsors and a team of six adult chaperones—bus-driver friends and others in the community. Together, we planned our most ambitious trip yet, a month-long drive across the country to visit colleges, civil-rights monuments and historic cities.