Special needs, Special driver

The short yellow bus pulls up. John Blanks walks out of his house and down the drive, his 18-year-old son Graham on his back.

The bus door opens. The driver is a 72-year-old woman dressed in black and purple wool and polyester and real pearls. This is Frankie Keen.

She greets Graham, who is a little over 4 feet tall, with a wide, white-toothed smile. Each morning, Keen works as John Blanks’ ally, smiling and welcoming Graham to the bus, bearing patience when Graham is having a stubborn day.

“I could search the world and not find a better driver for my special-needs son,” Blanks says.

Keen and her aide, Shari Merrill, also are the perfect team for Donnie Caldwell’s foster son, Jacob. When Caldwell heard that Jacob had been assigned to another driver’s route, he went to the school transportation center to protest. Caldwell got the change reversed.

“I do not want him on any other bus…” Caldwell says, his voice rising as he recollected the situation. “I want him on their bus. He’s

comfortable with them. He loves them and wants to be with them.”

Jacob, 18, has a loving disposition, but can sometimes act out or be aggressive, Caldwell says. Some adults react to him with fear or anger. Keen and Merrill treat Jacob with affection when he wants to be loved and a calm lack of tolerance when he misbehaves. Caldwell has seen Jacob, who is autistic, go from a terrible day at school to a peaceful mood by the time he gets home.

“Bus drivers do not get the appreciation and the kudos they need,” Caldwell says. “Nobody really understands what they go through. Nobody really understands how special you have to be.”

Keen and Merrill run eight hours and 129 miles a day together. They face everything from unsafe drivers to medical emergencies to runaway students. Sometimes they literally take punches.

Keen’s role is to be a steady pair of hands at the wheel and a surrogate parent for her passengers.

“They belong to the mom and daddy when they’ve got them, but when they are here they are mine,” Keen says.

“Just like people choose to be a doctor or a lawyer or an Indian chief, I choose to drive the bus because I love my children.”

***

Keen fuels her bus at around 6 a.m., the sky above pitch black. Diesel smoke fogs a landscape of yellow buses, lined up into the distance at the Lynchburg City Schools transportation center off Mayflower Drive.

She usually gets out of bed around 3:30 a.m. She doesn’t have to be at work for hours, but she rises to fix a home-cooked lunch for her retired husband: pork chops, macaroni and cheese and scalloped potatoes.

Keen also uses the time to put on her makeup and fix her hair — she rolls the top and sides with a curling iron.

Her attention to appearance is a matter of both personal satisfaction and professional strategy, honed during prior experience busing high-school students.

“If you are dressed appropriately and they see that you care for yourself, they do better,” Keen says.

She and Merrill pull out of the bus terminal at 6:30.

They head north and west, toward the Linkhorne neighborhood. Deer raise their heads in the darkness as the bus passes. When Bus 106 crests the top of a hill, the black outlines of mountains are visible, cut out against the now pink sky.

Each morning follows a similar routine.

Keen and Merrill pick up a handful of E.C. Glass High School special education students, including Blanks, and take them to their school. Then, they turn their attention to picking up students for the Laurel Regional School, which serves area students with profound mental and physical disabilities. Finally, they pick up a busload of elementary school students and take them to Paul Munro. Between her morning and afternoon routes, Keen also does a quick run to pick up a student at the Rivermont school.

The Lynchburg City Schools use six wheelchair-accessible school buses like Keen’s to serve approximately 90 special-needs students, ages 4 to 22 years old. Some special-needs students ride the regular school buses as well.

Keen’s bus has 12 seats, two wheelchair hook-ups, floral carpets in the aisle and an all-purpose kit that includes cleaning supplies, baby wipes, tissues and a towel. A plastic Santa decoration hangs around long after Christmas.

Students on Keen’s bus run the gamut. Many, but not all, have major physical or mental disabilities; some just have a good reason not to ride a big bus on a long route. At school, they can be in special education, mainstream classes or some of both.

Keen greets each student and helps Merrill with the children in wheelchairs. “Come on here boyfriend,” and “That’s my baby,” she clucks.

Keen has been driving school buses since 1971, the beginning of court-ordered school busing in Richmond. Keen lived in Richmond at the time and figured that if her children were going to be bused across town, she might as well be the one to do it. She said she’s been driving in Lynchburg for about 36 years: every size of school bus and every type of student: young and old, special needs and not.

In her years as a driver she has gathered certain wisdom of the trade. If she is early arriving somewhere, for instance, she generally waits down the street before pulling up to the drive, because early arrival can throw parents off.

There is one rule of thumb Keen repeats over and over: “Special-needs children do not like change.”

Each student on Keen’s bus has a seat he or she sits in each time, every time. Keen said the students even complain if she turns down a different street than usual.

Graham Blanks’ mother Betty Lynn Blanks thinks the rule applies to Graham, too. She says Graham, who has developmental disabilities, enjoys surprises, but only within established routine.

Each morning she works to get him out of bed and his father lets him ride down to the bus on his back as part of their morning ritual. Then he gets to hug Keen, who has been driving Graham on and off for the past dozen years.

Chatting with Keen has become part of John Blanks’ ritual, too.

“I’ve never seen her when she is not in a positive mood,” says Blanks, who likes finding out what Keen has fixed for her husband’s lunch. “I walk back up the hill to my house and kind of smile about what she says and what she does.”

Keeping students happy and calm on the bus isn’t always so easy. Some students on the Laurel route moan, which can irritate other students who don’t like the noise. One boy has a habit of taking off his shoes and throwing them in the aisle. The students can have bad days. Keen and Merrill can’t.

***

Keen eats lunch with a group of girlfriends in the break room of the transportation center, then she and Merrill head off again on their afternoon route.

What the afternoon route lacks in wildlife, it makes up in other features.

Beside the road, a man in a pea-green overcoat does a hip-swivel dance for the bus as it passes. Keen gives a ritual shimmy in return.

At the Laurel School, Keen parks and waits her turn to pick up students. They all make their way to the bus, and Keen and Merrill work together to strap in the wheelchairs and seat the students. Soon, only Caldwell’s son is missing. The two women begin to wonder aloud if Jacob has had a bad day.

Their fears come to nothing. He is skipping as he comes out of the school on the arm of a staff member, the wind blowing his light-brown hair.

On the bus, he and Merrill exchange a high-five. He gazes out the window as though he is seeing the world for the first time. Merrill sits in a seat nearby and engages with him, laughing and talking. He grabs for her necklace; she catches his hand, puts it in hers and pats it.

“You just want my attention, don’t you?” she asks. He puts his hand to his mouth and makes a whooping noise: Merrill whoops back in return.

For the moment, his mood buoys the two women. Then, he stands up from his seat on the moving bus.

Merrill stands too, watching to see what he will do, configuring herself to contain him if need be. Keen is also on alert. Jacob walks from his seat to another empty one and plops down. He does not get up again, but when Merrill sits down close to him he reverts to grabbing at her.

“A little too lovey-dovey,” is Keen’s diagnosis.

At the wheel, she makes a split-second decision to head for Caldwell’s house, one drop-off out of turn. Caldwell greets his foster-son, who takes his arm, skipping again on the way up to the house.

Keen drives away, then explains that she often has to make decisions like this, whether for behavior or medical problems. Sometimes it is best to pull over by the side of the road. Other times it’s better just to deliver a student to their home as soon as possible.

No schedule can compromise the safety of Keen’s charges.

“You’ve got to let every parent know their child is the most important one on the bus,” Keen says, then pauses.

“Because they absolutely are.”

w Contact Pounds at jpounds@newsadvance.com or (434) 385-5561.