Boston School is Leading the Nation in Field Trips Taken on Party Buses with Stripper Poles
Shutterstock Images.Speaking as someone who was born and very nearly raised in Boston, I can tell you that its schools pride themselves on their many firsts. It was the first school system in the nation, founded in 1647. Boston Latin became the first public school in the Americas 12 years before that. Mather was the first elementary school, opening its doors in 1639. Some of you may think Boston Public Schools were first city in America to have ugly racial strife, but that's not accurate. The city didn't invent it, merely lead the nation in it.
But now BPS has another first it can be proud of. Thanks to a shortage of school bus drivers and one resourceful teacher thinking on his feet.
Source - Who said school isn’t fun? PennLive reports that Jim Mayers, an 11th-grade English teacher in Boston, was forced to rent a party bus for a class field trip because of a school bus driver shortage across the nation. The party bus had everything: stripper poles, neon lights—and hundreds of kids. “It is a funny story, but there actually is a real bus shortage, and it speaks to major flaws in our education system,” tweeted Mayers. He encouraged people to reach out to their local elected officials and push for more funding in the education system. “Including paying all bus drivers, facilities, and operations staff a competitive salary & comprehensive benefits. Whatever you think is enough, double it.”
Mr. Mayers is not kidding, there's a major shortage of school bus drivers. To the point the governor has been ordering National Guard reservists in to pick up the slack. But with all due respect to this fine educator, that is not the story here. The story is that this is a perfect example of a teacher giving kids the kinds of real-world life lessons that they're never going to get in his class from reading "Beowulf" and diagramming sentences.
Seriously, this is better than anything you'd see in one of those movies from the 90s where a teacher would touch the lives of at-risk kids through tough love or teaching them that Rap is a form of poetry. In renting that party bus, he opened these kids' eyes in a way the internet never could. By showing them first hand about what real joy can be all about. Where drunken debauchery happens. Where neon lights mixed with booze and drugs, a professional designated driver and stripper poles can be exactly the kind of responsible adult fun they can have if they work hard in school and believe in themselves. Not to mention the sorts of career opportunities that open up for a young lady when she learns she has skills on the pole.
Not to make this about me, but I could've benefited from exposure to a mobile nudie club like this when I was a high school junior. As it was, I had to see for myself what that world was at a much later age. And one of the old bricks-and-mortar tittay club in Boston's old Combat Zone. The Naked I to be exact. At the ripe old age of 19. At my cousin's bachelor party. With a college ID. Having never seen a stripper pole in person before, I remember the experience was confusing and hard to process. If only my 11th grade English teacher could've put aside the Hamlet and the writing assignments long enough to rent us a party bus, I would've been exposed to the stale liquor smells, the dried puke in the carpeting, the jizz stained cushions, and the air of desperate sadness, and the inside of that sad, pathetic place would've been less of a culture shock.
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Fortunately, those Boston kids are one-up on the world. Education should be all about preparing young people for adult life. To show them they have a place in this world and give them the tools to go make it their own. And he did that for them on this day. If I'm a student of a public school and a field trip on a party bus is in my future, those bus drivers can take their sweet time getting back to work as far as I'm concerned.