View from the North 40: The birthplace of movie plots: Bus garage

The truth isn’t always stranger than fiction, but the truth could strangely inspire fiction.

A big article we ran in the paper this week illuminated the trouble our local school system is having finding bus drivers to help transport students to events. I know, it seems mildly interesting at best, but apparently, it is a big deal because this bus driver shortage is occurring all over the country.

However, for as far as my Google searches can see Brooke Charter School in Boston is the only school that had the ingenuity to hire a party bus complete with a stripper pole to transport their kids on a field trip.

Sure, the overall situation in real life is a bit of a tragedy, well, a tragicomedy. But for the movie industry it’s also a situational comedy gem that needs to be made into a hit summer movie, right? The tickets would sell themselves, and you can almost smell the popcorn already.

We know this cast of characters, the earnest Advanced Placement language and writing teacher being forced by circumstances beyond his control to take desperate measures to get his students to their destination. All of the students are smart, except that one kid who’s faking it so he can weasel his way into a university for which he is in no way qualified.

But among the smart kids is a few true awkward dorks, an innocent, an arrogant jock, a hot girl and a bad boy, though I like to think in this day and age we can have a hot guy and a bad girl.

Somewhere along the line they will find alcohol and condoms, and somehow, you know somehow, actual strippers are going to end up on that bus but they will have sage advice, brains and hearts of gold — except that one white trash number in the ill-fitting satin shorts but, hey, somebody has to be the bad example so these kids can really learn their lesson.

The script practically writes itself.

A Washington Post article from Aug. 16 says EastSide Charter School in Wilmington, Delaware, is going to be fodder for a grownups’ movie because that school is offering parents $700 to drop off and pick up their children for the school year. You know that movie is going to be about parents scamming the system.

The situation could be worse, though.

NPR.org reported Sept. 15 that Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker called out 250 National Guard to serve as school bus drivers. Ninety Guard members were scheduled to start training immediately for service in four school districts.

You know if this was a movie that area would now be destined for a natural disaster of some kind that will make everyone grateful that soldiers were there to protect the children.

It’s impossible to predict that movie line, though. They could have a storm of the century, maybe snow and ice, maybe a freak late hurricane.

Or they could be headed in a completely different direction with a prison break at the local psychopath prison ward, and at least one kid will get held hostage. Or aliens. They might get aliens dropping out of the sky. And no matter what the plot line is, they will have a countdown clock ticking the time away toward certain doom.

Sadly, though, here in the real world, the Sept. 22 Associated Press article at Huffington Post says that the teacher with the stripper pole party bus is using the incident as a teachable moment. Yawn. Initially, he tweeted something funny about the school having to hire a party bus for the field trip, but when it went viral he deleted the post.

Now he’s using the incident as a platform to tell the world about the bus driver shortage across the U.S.

That sounds just like the news. Period. Paragraph. End text.

Lame.

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I guess we could make it into one of those everyday-man-turned-community-activist/hero movies, but it’s probably going to have to be made as an independent film — only because no one makes after-school specials anymore at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .