A sign hanging in the break room at a Manchester garage proclaims a universal truth.
"Everyone is in awe of the lion tamer in a cage with half a dozen lions," the anonymous quote reads. "Everyone but a school bus driver."
It's enough to make Karen Rice roll her eyes and chuckle knowingly.
She is a school bus driver. And not just any school bus driver.
Rice is one of 488 drivers certified to work for the school bus fleet rated best in Maryland -- and one of this year's 50 best in the United States. So says School Bus Fleet magazine, which recently recognized the 364-bus fleet of Carroll County public schools in its fourth annual Great Fleets Across America issue.
Rice's supervisors say she is typical of their exemplary crew.
She gets up at 5 o'clock in the morning and reports to work at 6:30. She steers her big yellow bus off the lot at 6:44, and spends the next two hours and 38 minutes shuttling chatty and antsy elementary and middle school children from their homes to their schools.
She battles motorists who fume over the frequent stops she makes. She fights traffic congestion that can make the early-morning southbound lane of Route 30 in northern Carroll County as headache-inducing as the Bay Bridge on a sunny Saturday in June. And unlike a suburban mom running errands with her children in the backseat, Rice cannot placate the 35 children sitting behind her with candy, books or puzzles.
And she loves every minute of it.
"It's hard to put into words," Rice said last week as she readied school bus No. 383 for her morning routes. "I love to drive. I feel like I'm always getting something accomplished because I'm on a mission to get these kids to school. And it's such an awesome responsibility. I know how I feel about my two boys, and to multiply that 50 times with other people's children, I don't take that lightly."
Carroll's school bus drivers travel more than 6 million miles a year, making more than 9,000 stops each day and dropping off 26,200 children at 40 schools in the county and 16 special education schools as far away as Rockville. Just a few hours later, they run the same routes in reverse, fetching students from school and depositing them back at the driveways where they found them that morning. It all adds up to 1.6 million bus stops a year.
For this, they are paid about $10 to $12 an hour, depending on which of the school system's 78 contractors employ them.
"It is really tough to be a school bus driver," said James Doolan, a former special education teacher who now runs the Carroll system's transportation department. "They drive down the road with 60 kids behind them. You try turning your back on 60 kids and be responsible for them. Try it in your own car. It's tough enough with your own kids."
In recognizing the Carroll bus fleet, editors at the 37-year-old trade magazine noted the district's efficiency. They applaud its commitment to safety, noting that in Carroll County, "a scratch is considered an accident." They trumpet the district's "dynamic, informative driver-training lessons" and an accident review process that has become a model for school systems around the state.
Doolan said his fleet is also distinguished by his insistence on having the most up-to-date safety features long before state or federal law requires them. Buses in Carroll County have crossing arms that swing out in front of the bus at each stop. They have rooftop strobe lights that increase buses' visibility in the foggiest weather. They even have remotely operated -- and heated -- side mirrors that wouldn't ice up in even the worst winter weather.
Despite all the technologically advanced bells and whistles that make Carroll buses so safe, certain aspects of riding a bus have remained the same.
The lumbering vehicles remain shockingly yellow. The throaty rumble of the engine has not quieted, nor has the deafening pop of the air brakes diminished. The ride at the back of the bus is just as bumpy, the ivy-green vinyl seats are just as slippery, and getting the seats where the hump of the tire forms a natural footrest is just as exciting.
"The bus is great," said Tyler Hall, a gap-toothed first-grader at Spring Garden Elementary who has been on Rice's route for two years. "It's more faster than cars."
Of the driver he knows as Miss Karen (and whom many of his classmates refer to simply as Miss Bus Driver Lady), Tyler said, "She's nice because she tells us to be safe. No bumping into each other. And no standing up. That's it."
Rice became a bus driver late in her career, after stints as a deputy sheriff in Culpeper, Va., as a full-time mother to her sons, who are now ages 15 and 22, and with her husband's racehorse-hauling operation.
"It's something that's been in the back of my mind for a lot of years, but every time I mentioned it to someone, they'd say, 'What are you thinking?'" said Rice, who lives just over the Pennsylvania line in Glen Rock, and who declined to discuss her age.
"Let's just say I know who Dwight Eisenhower is," she said. "The kids on this route are always trying to guess how old I am, so that will take the mystery out of it if you put that in there."
Now that she's driving a school bus, Rice couldn't be happier. She especially enjoys the morning, when perks of the job include glittering sunrises and glimpses of pumpkin patches, buffalo and Christmas tree farms as Rice crisscrosses the pastoral stretches of road on the outskirts of Manchester and Hampstead.
"It's a far more enjoyable ride in the morning because the kids haven't fully awakened yet," she said. "It's a more serene ride. The afternoon is a little bit more interesting."
That's when the little lions tend to emerge.
"Sometimes the volume in here gets to the point where, if there's no one behind the bus and I won't be interfering with traffic, I tell them, 'I'm not going to move the bus until it gets quiet and stays that way,'" Rice said.
"It usually only takes a second or two to calm them down then because everyone wants to get home," she added. "But that much energy getting ready to go home in this small space, it can be interesting sometimes."