Thanks to technology, beleaguered school bus drivers have a new tool to control rowdy students: give 'em the Interwebs to surf.
Students endure hundreds of hours on yellow buses each year getting to and from school in this desert exurb of Tucson, and stir-crazy teenagers break the monotony by teasing, texting, flirting, shouting, climbing (over seats) and sometimes punching (seats or seatmates).
But on this chilly morning, as bus No. 92 rolls down a mountain highway just before dawn, high school students are quiet, typing on laptops.
Morning routines have been like this since the fall, when school officials mounted a mobile Internet router to bus No. 92’s sheet-metal frame, enabling students to surf the Web. The students call it the Internet Bus, and what began as a high-tech experiment has had an old-fashioned — and unexpected — result. Wi-Fi access has transformed what was often a boisterous bus ride into a rolling study hall, and behavioral problems have virtually disappeared.
“It’s made a big difference,” said J. J. Johnson, the bus’s driver. “Boys aren’t hitting each other, girls are busy, and there’s not so much jumping around.”
haha! porn and neo nazi stuff. hahaha.
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However, most high school students are relatively quiet in the mornings. The ones not trying to get a few more minutes of sleep are already surfing the net on their cellphones. And the girls are putting on their make-up.
@ Geekazoid and Larry - if the kids do not have those interpersonal skills when they get on the bus, there is a small chance they they will learn them on the bus, but I would not put money on it. Kids have to learn some repspect at home. Dealing with bullies has somehow become the job of the driver, and not the parents. When discipline problems (bullying or fighting) are addressed, the parents always reply "Well my kid would never do that."
The high school actually blocks the vast majority of websites, especially porn, youtube, and social networking thing, and neo nazi stuff. It's actually hard to do a research paper about Nazis without stumbling on a blocked site. Which of course, the computer tells you is blocked.
I just wanted to add my input as im a student at this high school (Empire High School), for a couple of years now