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March 29, 2024 2:34 am
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Transporting Moapa Valley Kids Safely For 40 Years

By CHARLENE PAUL

Moapa Valley Progress

Long time local bus driver Susie Fly, with her bus-driving husband Greg. The couple has lived in Moapa Valley since 1977. PHOTO BY CHARLENE PAUL/Moapa Valley Progress.

When CCSD school bus driver Susie Fly and her husband Greg moved to Moapa Valley on Memorial Day, 1977, they passed a big, yellow school bus parked by Gubler and the highway. She turned to Greg and said, “I want to be a school bus driver.”
“It won’t happen,” he told her. “You can never get those civil service jobs.”

Five years later, Susie was working as a waitress at Lost City Cafe (now where Sugar’s Home Plate is located). One afternoon, she walked into the café to ask David Storey, the cook, what shift she would be working that week.

Storey had also worked as a school bus driver. As they visited, he informed her there were no substitute bus drivers in the valley.
“You want to be a bus driver?” he asked.

“You won’t believe this,” she replied. “I do. I always wanted to be a bus driver.”
Storey pointed to four men seated at a table across the room. “Go over to those four guys and tell them you want to be a bus driver,” he said.

She figured it was a longshot, but she walked over to the table with her little daughter on her hip and told them of her desire to drive a school bus. She was surprised when one of them asked if she had a babysitter.

“That was my interview,” she said. “‘Do you have a babysitter?’ I told them yeah, we have the gas station across the street. My husband will babysit. They told me to go into Vegas and take my test and then call them.”

A few days after the “interview,” a friend drove her into town where she took her test. She was hired on March 20, 1979.

Susie laughed as she said that she called her husband and reported to him, “You won’t believe how much money I’m getting paid an hour. FIVE DOLLARS AN HOUR! Can you believe that?”

Normally, it took 4-5 years before a driver would be hired full-time. But it didn’t work that way for Susie.
“The guy told me there was a full-time position driving the Moapa bus,” she said. “‘Do you want it?’ I told him I didn’t know; I would have to ask my husband. He said, ‘Oh, you’ll take it,’ and he was right. I only had three days’ training before I got my bus. Now, new drivers get three weeks’ training.”

Four years later, she brought an application to Greg.
“He started as a sub in 1983, and was finally hired on full-time in 1988.”

In her 40 years driving a school bus, Susie had been the lead driver a couple of times, and she has driven all of the routes – from Echo Bay to Warm Springs, a 65-mile radius, as well as back and forth to Mesquite on I-15.

She has also driven Nevada’s highways. She was nine months pregnant with her son when she drove a bus full of kids to Tonopah.

She drove a bus load of baseball players to Panaca one year and got caught in a blizzard.
“I don’t do snow,” she said. “It was so stormy you couldn’t see the white lines.”

Susie said that she has literally spent hours on I-15 in traffic. “When traffic gets back up or comes to a stop, they don’t make exceptions for school buses,” Susie said. “We have to wait just like everyone else. Of course, everyone else doesn’t have a bus full of kids wanting to get to an activity or to go home. But the kids are usually pretty good.”

Susie is no fan of writing citations for students who have bad behavior on her bus.
“I get a little Post-it note and write my number on it,” she said. “Then I tell the kid, ‘You know what you did; I know what you did. Give this to your dad or mom. If I don’t get a call by six o’clock tonight, I’m writing a citation.’”

If you ask her about favorite kids, she will tell you, “I take the hardest kids and make them my friends. I think they are reaching out for somebody. I talk to them and give them some sort of little responsibility.”

Susie laughs when she says Reilly Frei, the new principal at Virgin Valley High School and Kelby Robison, assistant principal at Ute V. Perkins Elementary School were a couple of the kids she transported on her bus.

There have also been heartbreaks throughout the years.
“When Richie Cameron drowned at the reservoir, that was hard,” she said with tears in her eyes. “And when Ben Crosby died, that was hard. When Leisha Marshall and Heather Wallace were killed in that horrible accident, my heart broke. Those are my kids.”

Susie has seen a lot of changes in CCSD transportation in her four decades. But one thing never seems to change – they are slow to make changes and improvements.

“We need a mechanic out here and we need newer buses,” she said. “And when they decided to have us park our buses at the bus yard at Lyon Middle School 15 years ago, they promised they would pave it. As it is now, whenever it rains, we call it Lake Lyon.

There are so many puddles and it is so muddy, there is no need to wear good shoes.”
After 40 years, most people would be happy to retire, but not Susie.
“I love the kids. I’ll keep driving as long as my health will allow me to keep them safe,” she said.

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1 thought on “Transporting Moapa Valley Kids Safely For 40 Years”

  1. Such a great pair! I’ve known Greg and Susie for over 50 years. They lived in Gardena, Ca when I met the Fly family. All moved out to Nevada.

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