After many years driving kids to school, Marcy Vaca can sum up in a single word the pivotal quality needed in a school bus driver: Heart.
“You have to have a good heart because we’re working with kids,” said Vaca, known as “Miss Marcy” to her young passengers. “You can make their day or totally ruin it.”
Vaca realizes that she is the first NUSD employee that dozens of students see every morning and the last one they see each afternoon. She understands that parents are counting on her to get their kids to and from school safely.
Her record is accident-free in nearly 11 years of driving for NUSD, she said, and she’s determined to keep it that way.
“I’m very religious, so every day I thank God and I ask him for a favor – to never, ever let me hurt one of these kids,” she said.
A native of Mexico, Vaca came to American in 1990. She has two sons and a daughter of her own, all grown now, ranging from 20 to 26 years old. When she isn’t working, two of her favorite activities are shopping and cooking. Asked to describe herself, she said, “I’m a happy person, positive – I feel like I own my life and I’m not going to let anybody else ruin it.”
Charmingly personable and unconventional, Vaca named her 78-passenger school bus Bob for the simplest and most basic reason of all. “Because he looks like a Bob,” she said, smiling. She also likes bugs, any type of bug – lady bugs, ants, crickets, you name it. Kill a bug? Not Marcy. “For me, being mean to kids or being mean to animals is not OK, it’s being a bully, you know?”
Children clearly are her first love. She transports students to and from H. Allen Hight Elementary, Natomas Middle School, NP3 and Discovery High School every day. As they enter, she banters with and smiles at them. She once considered switching to city buses, not school buses, but decided she’d miss “her kids” too much.
Perhaps you can tell a lot about Vaca’a priorities by how she decorates the bus beside “Bob’s” steering wheel. You’ll find two Happy Face images, a lady bug magnet, a Virgo symbol, a sticker expressing empathy toward autistic students, a photograph of a special needs student, two magnets given her by student riders – a lizard and an elephant, and an aging thank-you note written by a teacher complimenting Miss Marcy’s “patience and smile on our Angel Island trip.”
Asked if she has any special memories from her job, Vaca recalls a special needs child singing her “Happy Birthday” last year.
“I think our job is important because we transport the future,” she said of school bus drivers. “A lot of times I tell my kids, ‘I don’t know if I’m transporting the next president of the United States.’ Then I always say – remember me (when you’re president), OK?”
