Last school day takes new class to MU campus

The bus door swings open as 48 fourth-graders come tramping down the aisle, holding onto guide-rails and bumping into each other.

Among this youthful throng stand six chaperones from Parkade Elementary School — three parents, two teachers and one instructional aide — whose purpose is to help the children find a seat. As the seats begin to fill, students spill out into the aisle and sit on the floor while passengers riding the Columbia Transit bus watch the spectacle before them.

Due to teacher Elaine Janes’ organization and Columbia Transit’s participation in the Partners in Education program, these fourth-graders are able to ride through Columbia, making stops for a tour of the MU campus and some playtime at Cosmopolitan Park, all for free.

“We were thinking, ‘What can we do that can be something different?’” Janes says.

Despite the ruckus at the start of the trip, passengers soon fall into the usual etiquette of public transportation, staring absently ahead, lips shut.

That is, until one child recognizes a man sitting across from her. Discovering that he has stumbled upon a field trip, he turns, smiling at the rest of the students, and yells out, “Are you excited that this is the last day of school?”

The bus resounds with a boisterous “Yeah.”

For Janes, the campus tour is essential to her students’ experience. In taking the children to see a college campus, Janes said she hoped they would see attending college as an attainable goal.

“I was hoping that it makes them (say), ‘Yes, I can be here. I should be here. I will be here,’” she says.

During their tour, the students are given information about college life and curriculum, and then they tour the recreational facilities. The latter, with big screen TVs, three pools and underwater speakers, impresses the students.

The trip did cause some students to start pondering their distant academic futures.

Cheyenne Brodersen, 10, said the MU campus was exciting and she would like to go to college to be a doctor.

As for the buses, what mattered to her, in the midday sun, was air conditioning.

“They were better than the school buses, although we were getting squished,” she said.