The History of How School Buses Became Yellow
The brainchild of education expert Frank Cyr, the meeting at Columbia University carried the goal of establishing national construction standards for the American school bus. Two years earlier, Cyr had conducted a ten-state study where he found that children were riding to school in trucks and buses of all different colors, and even horse-drawn wagons, in the case of one Kansas school district he visited. Standardization would solve two problems and simultaneously revolutionize school buses themselves: one, being uniformly one color would make bus travel safer; two, costs to districts would be lower as construction specifications would make it possible for manufacturers to mass-produce buses.
At the time of the conference, Cyr had more than 30 years of experience with rural schools. Born in 1900 in a sod house in Nebraska’s Republican River Valley, Cyr and his fellow classmates, like many rural students, traveled great distances to school. After attending Grinnell College and graduating from the University of Nebraska with a bachelor’s degree in agriculture, Cyr spent nearly a decade in country schools, first as a teacher in Winner, South Dakota, then, as a school superintendent in Chappell, Nebraska. In promoting school-bus standardization and greater use of the buses in rural areas, Cyr saw an opportunity for rural school districts to save resources through consolidation. The Rockefeller-backed General Education Board provided Cyr $5000 ($92,000 in 2019) to study local school-bus needs and bring together the various parties who could effectuate needed changes.
