Preschoolers filed off the bus one by one at Lincoln Elementary Monday morning. They said their goodbyes to their faithful bus driver, Carole Kissler, who helped them off the bus and made sure they got where they needed to go.
As she prepared to close up her doors and drive back to the office, a child walking by shouted, “Hi, Ms. Carole!” before heading into the school building. She smiled and waved to her.
“That’s a granddaughter of a coach that coached volleyball. She does that every day,” Kissler said.
Kissler has been driving a school bus for Gering Public Schools, and then Gering routes for First Student when it was contracted about a decade ago, for 47 years. The job includes regular morning and afternoon bus routes, as well as driving for activities.
“Because I’ve done a lot of activities through the years, I’ve gotten real close to some of the coaches (and their families),” she said. “ … I like sports, love sports. I enjoy sitting and watching them … and (keeping) up with the kids.”
Kissler originally began driving a bus because she was looking for a flexible part-time job that allowed her to make some money while still spend a decent amount of time at home with her three children.
“A neighbor lady was a driver, and she said, ‘They’ve got a job opening,’ so I went down and I just drove a couple hours a day,” Kissler said. “…I’ve just been here ever since.”
She stopped driving during the spring of 2020, like all bus drivers did, when COVID hit the Panhandle and closed up the schools. She also took off a few months in the fall of 2020 when her husband died, but she couldn’t stay away from the kids forever.
“I went back in September, and then my husband passed away in October, so I went and stayed with my daughter for four months and didn’t drive (the bus),” she said. “But I knew I still needed to have a purpose, so that’s why I came back, and for the most part I enjoy it.”
One of Kissler’s favorite parts of the job is building relationships with the students, even though it might look different to them off the bus.
“Some of them really like you. They’ll get on and they’ll give you a hug or something,” she said with a laugh. “…When I would go to town and I’d have a little kid come up and they’d go, ‘Huhhhh, oh!’ because I think they thought I lived in the bus. I didn’t go out and about.”
Despite them not knowing where bus drivers live, Kissler said she loves being able to interact with the students from the time they are little to the time they are older. She’s driven just about all ages of students, and she always enjoys watching them grow.
“The kids, (they’re) kind of your extended family,” she said. “I’ve just driven preschool for the last two years, and just to see how some of them progress … because some of them are real afraid at first.
"We have one little boy right now that was so shy that he wouldn’t even say (anything). He just kind of put his head down when he’d come into the bus. Well now — and see how long it’s taken since September — but he’ll smile now and sometimes he’ll say hi.”
Having been driving the bus for 47 years, Kissler has since driven former bus riders’ children and even grandchildren. She said it often happens that she’ll meet an adult in the store or at a game, and they would remember her from when they were little. In fact, even Lisa McConkey-Brown, the bus aide who rides with Kissler to keep the students in line while she’s driving, had Kissler for a bus driver when she was in school.
“I go somewhere and somebody’ll go, ‘Mrs. Kissler, you used to drive my bus.’ And here, they’re grown and have kids or maybe even grandkids,” Kissler said.
McConkey-Brown added, “We dropped off one of our kids in grade school the other day, and he said, ‘Mrs. Kissler? You were my bus driver.'”
The job of bus driving is not without its challenges, though, Kissler said. Some children can be more difficult to handle on the bus, but Kissler sees her role as more than just disciplining ornery children while driving them to and from school.
“There’s been some times that you just have kids that are more difficult, and I try to think about maybe what’s going on with their life and maybe just being kinder to them, because maybe that’s all they see,” she said. “We are the first one that sees them in the morning and then the last school person that sees them in the afternoon. So, sometimes I think we can make their day.
“When they get on, I always try to greet the kids. I’d say, ‘Good morning.’ You know, that may help some of them.”
At the end of the day, her main job is to drive children safely, and at times it can be stressful. That’s why she has always taken her job seriously.
“I’ve got 40 kids behind me that I’m responsible for to get home safely,” she said. “…I’ve always just felt like it was an important job. Getting the kids there safely, I just think they need us.”
*Originally published in the Gering Courier on Nov. 25, 2021.
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