Taking the wheel

Jeffrey Hubbard’s not only the superintendent of the Newport-Mesa Unified School District, he’s also a dad. So he knows what it’s like to drive with the kids in the back seat sometimes.

“But can you imagine having 40?” he said, laughing after getting a lesson on how to drive a school bus Wednesday.

Hubbard took the wheel of a school bus as part of a program to improve bonds between administrators and their employees who work outside the classroom like janitors, cooks and bus drivers.

“It was fabulous. It was great — really, really fun,” Hubbard said of his driver’s lesson. “The size of the bus makes it really difficult. That’s a lot different from driving a passenger car.”

More importantly, though, his lesson with bus driver Robert Villalobos helped him understand what it takes to get the kids to class each day, he said.

“It is motivational and I think it is empathy, creating in a sense that we really get a picture of what goes on in the work of all these people,” Hubbard said.

It was the third year the district has had the event.

“My first year was in food services: I helped the nutritional services and I burned the eggs, but that’s another story,” Hubbard said. “Every morning I want to drive by and thank those wonderful people who have already been at work for an hour and a half or two hours, because they have to get there so early to feed all of our kids. It just helps me to be a better superintendent because I can understand what they’ve been doing.”

Cindy Means, president of the Classified Employees Union, which represents workers like Villalobos, said the union asked Hubbard if he was game to drive a bus Wednesday.

“Well, we are trying to give the administrators the opposite of what they see every day,” Means said. “So, Dr. Hubbard has to deal with all the great big problems — well, both sides do, but a lot is education, so we’d like to get out and have him see how classified employees educate our children. We just kind of randomly said, ‘Would you like to learn how to drive a bus?’ and he said, ‘Yes, I would!’”

“This is a great program because I’ve always believed that, in order for us to work effectively together, we have to understand what each other does. No one really has an easy job in the school industry,” Hubbard said.