Total travel time to and from Wheels on the bus go round and round: about a number of hours.



"The first day I went along to school, I was like, do I actually want to do this? " Freeman, eighteen, said. But the ride rapidly became routine, and now Freeman doesn't hesitate to shoot down the notion of trading the two-hour holiday to the science and technology magnet school for your 10 minutes it would take him to go to his local high school.

It once was that students with the longest bus rides were individuals with rural addresses. Today, however, increasingly more of the longest school bus commutes fit in with suburban students, willing to put in the time so as to attend a prestigious magnet classes.

"Oh, I think it's worth the cost, " said Freeman, a mature at Thomas Jefferson. "I'm very happy at this school. It's one of those opportunities that comes to maybe a lucky few students. "

Sometimes along the trips that students are prepared to endure even surprises adults.

"I'll inform you when I felt it -- on that rare occasion when children miss the bus, and I am taking them home. I'm considering, 'Wow, "' said Montgomery Blair High school graduation Principal Phillip Gainous. Long commutes are getting to be routine at the Silver Spring high school, one of the largest throughout Montgomery and home to magnet programs in communications and scientific discipline that lure students from along 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 often easily stretch longer. Students discover how to make the best of it: One recent morning, a band of Thomas Jefferson freshmen huddled around a smallish light clamped to a math textbook to analyze for a test. Another scholar strummed a guitar. Still others dozed to music from their portable CD players.

Montgomery Blair once offered an associate program that gave far-flung students safe places to keep if the roads were tied up with bad weather or damages. But the program died from lack of use, Gainous claimed. "We don't do that ever again, because the kids are very much accustomed to traveling or waiting in the school, " he said. "They only sleep or do their homework. "

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

"She had her glue as well as her glitter. She would pour it out on the glue and then pour it back in the jar -- I don't think she spilled a single bit of glitter, " she said.

Grace's base school is Chantilly. Like any traffic-hardened veteran, she separates the woman's commuting time into "good traffic days" and "bad traffic nights. "

"Sometimes if traffic is very good, we get there at 8 a. m., " a trip of about a half-hour, Leeway said. "And sometimes we make it right before the bell rings" with 8: 30. On a recent icy morning that spawned dozens of car accidents and backups, Grace managed to get to school at 9: thirty.

She sees the positives. "You make a great deal of friends on the bus. I can take homework that I don't learn how to do and say, 'Here, assist me. ' There's some math whizzes around the bus. It's like study hall. "

In Prince William Region, 18-year-old Alan Hogan's hour-long bus ride is more like those of old: No magnet school, he just lives inside the rural, western part of the particular county. The stars are still bright when Hogan gets on the bus each morning. He attends Stonewall Jackson Senior high school, near Manassas. Prince William is constructing a high school for western-area college students, but it won't open until 2004.

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