A new hero emerged even before the first kickoff of Georgia’s high school football season, this one in the truest sense of the word.
Praise and gratitude are due Rome City Schools bus driver Nakita Strickland. Late on the night of Aug. 8, the longtime driver’s bus carrying members of the Rome High team on its way back from a scrimmage was struck by a car that had crossed into oncoming traffic. Thankfully, Strickland’s skill helped prevent what could have been a tragedy, according to the school district, which honored him at a school-board meeting last Tuesday.
Hit by a car whose driver was later charged with DUI, the bus rolled over multiple times, and 15 players went to the emergency room and later were released. Rome canceled its season opener Friday against Creekside High, but is expected to play its next game, Aug. 30 against Carrollton. It could have been far, far worse.
“As a parent and a representative of my family, I couldn’t be more grateful for how (Strickland) did that,” Will Byington, the father of a team member who was on the bus, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Because being on the scene, I could see how it was a miracle how he reacted and how bad it could have been. I appreciate him from the bottom of my heart for taking care of my kids and all his best friends and coaches on that bus. His actions really saved a lot of potential fatalities. Grateful to him forever.”
As the school year begins and yellow school buses pull out of middle-school and high-school parking lots across the state to enable young people to pursue their passions and dreams, Strickland’s life-saving heroics serve as a prompting to shine a light on the men and women who transport them.
“They are truly the unsung heroes of athletic events,” Rome coach John Reid wrote in an email to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Seen, but not heard. They get you there and get you home.”
Word of Strickland’s actions reached a former Atlantan of some renown, one who was once a high-school athlete and later had children who were as well.
Hearing of Strickland, “my appreciation for what (school-bus drivers) do and how they do it goes up a thousand notches, for sure,” Braves legend Dale Murphy wrote to The AJC in a text message, heaping praise on all underappreciated members of the community who help kids find their way in life.
Newnan High coach Chip Walker once was someone who sometimes fell asleep on the bus as it rode home from games. But in 2009, when he was coaching at Sandy Creek High, a scary (but ultimately harmless) moment on a trip back from a playoff game changed him. Ever since, Walker said he is alert and attentive and tries to be an extra set of eyes for the driver, aware of the potential hazards on the roads.
“I don’t necessarily worry as much about our bus drivers, per se, but just things around you that go on,” Walker told the AJC last week. “We’re going to be traveling through the middle of Atlanta (Friday). There’s a million things that can go on on the interstates going through Atlanta. You worry about everything around you and how it could affect you.”
As coach, Walker leads a contingent of perhaps 150 people, including players and student trainers. That’s a lot of precious cargo in the hands of his bus driver.
“Very grateful,” Walker said. “We’ve got great people that take care of us.”
Particularly in Middle and South Georgia, trips can be two hours or more, often on unlit back roads late at night.
“When you think about all the bus drivers and all the travel for all the places throughout the state, the bus drivers do an unbelievable job,” Lee County High coach Dean Fabrizio told the AJC.
Consider the sheer volume of the operation just for the 465 schools in GHSA. Across all sports and levels of competition, that’s tens of thousands of trips to games and back involving hundreds of thousands of riders. But only in extremely rare instances do they not end with all of the students filing safely off the bus at their schools.
Gwinnett County Public Schools bus drivers must undergo 156 hours of training in the classroom and on the road before they can be cleared to drive students.
Carla Hart, the GCPS transportation support manager, echoed Reid, calling the district’s roughly 1,600 drivers unsung heroes. Some have safely ferried students for more than 30 years. Hart calls them not just drivers for the school system’s 130,000 students, but district ambassadors for their care and service.
“They are there for students,” Hart told the AJC. “They are the first and last people that students see, whether it is going to and from school or if it is to and from a trip. They are the ones that students rely on to get to and from school and also to all of their sporting events.”
Sometimes, they provide even more than safe passage. In 2017, Rome played Warner Robins High at Warner Robins’ McConnell-Talbert Stadium for its second consecutive Class 5A state championship. At the time, the Wolves had a driver who had become a regular for the team’s charter bus trips for away games. While he had become a supporter, he had never said a word while on the bus, Reid wrote in his email. But that night, he flipped on the microphone to address the team before the game.
“Boys, this bus is for winners. Only winners ride this bus,” he said, according to Reid. “You go out there and win, ‘cause if you don’t, this bus won’t be here after the game.”
The response, per Reid: “The team went nuts.”
Final score: Rome 38, Warner Robins 0.
If you were (or are) a high-school athlete, chances are you hold warm memories of riding buses to away games — the conversations and laughs, the anticipation of competition as the bus neared its destination, the feeling of solidarity of walking off the bus as a team at a rival school, the giddy replaying of a victory on the way home.
But you may have taken for granted the man or woman at the front of the bus who enabled those moments by transporting you and your friends safely to your competitions and back.
After Nakita Strickland’s heroics, the Rome community surely doesn’t as much as it might have before. As for the rest of us, we can express our gratitude to Strickland and his fellow public servants across the state by being conscientious as we share the roads with them on fall Friday nights, rainy Monday mornings and all the days in between.
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