The books on the bus go ‘round and ‘round

OSVALDO PADILLA / FLORIDA WEEKLY Cesar Navarro Students beam at Cesar Navarro as they file into his bus and he beams back. “Good afternoon,” he tells each one. Many look up and respond in kind. Some of them even stop the line so they can update the driver about their lives.

“I got two stickers today,” one student says. Another tells him that today is his last day, he’s headed off to Italy with his parents.

Mr. Navarro doesn’t see himself as a chauffeur. Neither do the student passengers, who range in age from elementary to high school. Every day, Mr. Navarro, a Charlotte school bus driver, has an opportunity to teach students. Every point of contact and every greeting is a chance for him to make an impression. And he does.

“He goes above and beyond more than a bus ride,” said Patricia Anthony, the mother of a Kingsway Elementary School student. “He teaches respect, manners.”

On this day, a boy is stopped by Mr. Navarro’s outstretched arm. “Hold on. The girls go first, you know that,” he tells one anxious rider, a boy with a mischievous grin, who tried to run in front of a girl. “You were trying to pull a fast one,” Mr. Navarro said. Both student and driver are grinning now. The driver’s hand comes down. “OK, go ahead.”

“My deal is I try to teach,” said Mr. Navarro. “When I was a kid, we had to wear a tie with a white shirt. Ladies went first and we said ‘good morning.’” He expects the same courtesies from his riders. “Every single kid I say ‘good morning, good afternoon’ and they say it back. You’d be surprised how they respond. The parents love it.”

Instead of playing music on the bus, Mr. Navarro tunes in to NPR news.

He gets to know parents and family members on his route.

He checks his list, making sure that every child, particularly the elementary school kids, have their parents waiting at the stop before he pulls out for the next stretch of his route.

The burly Army veteran-turned-busdriver is the guiding force behind the Bus Drivers Reading Award program, launched at Kingsway Elementary School. His hope is to spread the same love for reading he had as a kid.

When the head librarian heard the idea for the award, she jumped on board. She and her husband took a discarded Publix display and created a large wooden bus touting the competition in the school library. Mr. Navarro spent money out of his own pocket to buy prizes like stuffed animals and duffle bags, and filled the bus display with them. Any student who reads five books in a month gets a prize from the “bus.”

Several bus drivers have now come together to create a cookbook they will sell to raise money for more prizes.

Growing up in the Bronx, N.Y., Mr. Navarro said he clearly remembers his teacher, Mrs. Bloom, reading the Boxcar Children mystery book series to his class. One day before a school break, Mrs. Bloom stopped ended the reading session midway through the book. Young Mr. Navarro couldn’t wait to find out what happened next. “She let me take it home. I was crazy about these books,” he said.

Mr. Navarro hopes children will find the books as intoxicating as he did as a lad. Three of the five books in Mr. Navarro’s challenge are from the Boxcar Children Mysteries series. Though he could have easily chosen contemporary favorites such as Harry Potter or “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” Mr. Navarro wanted to give today’s students a unique perspective.

The Boxcar Children Mysteries is a book series created by author Gertrude Chandler Warner, published in 1942. New books featuring a fictional family of mystery-solving orphans who made a home in a boxcar continue to be published to this day.

As children file onto his bus, Mr. Navarro leans forward slightly, to be closer to the children he’s greeting.

It’s a contrast to the years he spent standing at attention as a civil engineer for the Army. He oversaw the building and destruction of bridges and infrastructure in places like Vietnam, Germany, Panama and Okinawa.

“My wife always says, ‘How can a lean, mean first sergeant end up being so nice to children?’” He’s amused by the rhetorical question.

More children come and he leans forward again, smiling and greeting each one, as counselor and a friend, and sometimes tutor.

He’s a role model and a respected disciplinarian. His title is “bus driver,” but to the students and parents whose lives he touches, he is so much more than that. ¦