Switching gears from wheels to words
Retired school bus driver’s journey with Prince Charles students takes new turn
It was the last day of school before the Christmas holidays, and school bus driver Hugh Derrick pulled over at 124 Street and 117 Avenue to pick up a young girl.
“She got on the bus, and she was so upset. She had made me a present, and she forgot it at home,” Derrick recalled last week.
“She wasn’t going to be on the bus that afternoon, because she was going home with her mom.” He never saw her again. That night, Nicole CalahaisenSchmil, 9, and her mother, Rebecca Calahaisen, 42, were killed in a head-on collision near Fawcett, 150 km north of Edmonton, as the family made their way to Gift Lake for the holidays.
A 26-year-old man from Spruce Grove, driving while high on methamphetamine, was sentenced to 2-1/2 years in prison for dangerous driving in connection with the Dec. 16, 2005, crash.
Nicole’s portrait hangs on the wall of Prince Charles School, where Derrick drove the student daily.
Although retired, he now volunteers there every week, reading to the students.
In 2006, the relatives who cleaned out her mother’s apartment found the little girl’s forgotten Christmas gift, wrapped in newspaper, with sparkles glued all over it. It was really something, Derrick said.
Now 72, he had the package for two years before he could bring himself to open it. Inside was a stuffed teddy bear.
“You think you’re just driving kids,” Derrick said. “But they do things that will touch you.”
He spent more than 12 years as a bus driver, almost all of it ferrying children to Prince Charles School, he said. Nicole’s gift is one of many connections that keeps him tethered to the school, even in his second retirement.
Almost all Prince Charles students are Indigenous. When Derrick picked up the bus route 15 years ago, the school had high turnover among bus drivers. It made him more determined to stick it out.
Some of those clever kids had mischievous ideas, occasionally acting out on the bus so they’d get suspended and miss a day of school.
Derrick called their bluff, and refused to suspend anyone.
The longtime telecommunications professional, who worked with wires and devices — not people — got to know those children, and won their respect.
As he approached 70, Derrick said it was time to retire from driving. The next year, school staff asked him to help students with their reading.
Among them is seven-year-old Sapphira Gladue-Thomas, who likes reading Pete the Cat books.
“Reading is good, because you get smarter and smarter,” the first grader said last Wednesday.
Derrick takes two children at a time to the library and reads stories, plays word games and asks them to build sentences with flash cards.
“I look at them and I figure, any one of them could aspire to be anything. If I could just install some small bit of influence ... It makes me feel like that’s what we do to the world.”