Ideal Wheels on the Bus Melody with regard to Young children to be able to play to understand Language.

Total travel time to and from Wheels on the bus song for baby: about four hours.



"The first day I visited school, I was like, do I really need to do this? " Freeman, 16, said. But the ride quickly 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 that 10 minutes it would take him so that his local high school.

It was once that students with the longest bus rides were include those with rural addresses. Today, however, increasingly more of the longest school bus commutes belong to suburban students, willing to put in the time to be able to attend a prestigious magnet university.

"Oh, I think it's worthwhile, " said Freeman, a senior citizen 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 the capacity of the trips that students are able to endure even surprises adults.

"I'll inform you when I felt it -- with that rare occasion when young children miss the bus, and I am taking them home. I'm pondering, 'Wow, "' said Montgomery Blair High school graduation Principal Phillip Gainous. Long commutes have grown routine at the Silver Spring secondary school, one of the largest inside Montgomery and home to magnet programs in communications and scientific discipline that lure students from over the county.



School officials across the region strain to keep regular, in-boundary school bus rides under one hour. But that has no showing on magnet school commutes, that easily stretch longer. Students learn how to make the best of the item: One recent morning, a group of Thomas Jefferson freshmen huddled around a smallish light clamped to a math textbook to study for a test. Another student strummed a guitar. Still others dozed to music off their portable CD players.

Montgomery Blair once offered a buddy 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 said. "We don't do that any longer, because the kids are accustomed to traveling or waiting for the school, " he said. "They simply sleep or do their groundwork. "

Grace Chung, a 15-year-old Thomas Jefferson sophomore, tries to squeeze using some study time on the shuttle bus. But she's seen far much more intricate maneuvers: A friend once made an entire poster for spirit week, complete with glitter, during the commute to school.

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

Grace's basic school is Chantilly. Like almost any traffic-hardened veteran, she separates your ex commuting time into "good targeted traffic days" and "bad traffic days. "

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

She sees the positives. "You make lots of friends on the bus. I can take homework that I don't discover how to do and say, 'Here, support 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 magnetic field school, he just lives in the rural, western part of your county. The stars are still bright when Hogan gets about the bus each morning. He attends Stonewall Jackson Secondary school, near Manassas. Prince William is constructing a high school for western-area individuals, but it won't open until finally 2004.

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