As a means of transporting children from home to school and back again, the classic yellow school bus has an admirable and under-appreciated record of safety and reliability. Though most still lack seat belts, and though they travel winding routes in all kinds of weather, often at or near peak driving times, school buses are statistically better at delivering kids to their classrooms unharmed than parents, bicycles, or their own two legs.

But the school bus can also be a kind of rolling arena for bullying and abuse. It's not surprising. Kids on a crowded school bus are virtually unsupervised. The driver has to keep his or her eyes on the road. (though I remember the fearsome, cigar-chomping "Mr. C" of my youth, who really did seem to have eyes in the back of his head.) Lots can happen before it gets to the point of pulling the bus over to intervene.

From kindergarten through third grade, I rode a bus that could have generated a library shelf of sociological dissertations. It carried kids ranging right up to high school. The coolest, oldest kids sat at the back, where they controlled the action. The smallest, scaredest kids sat at the front, in vain hopes of falling within the protective zone of being within earshot of the driver. In the middle, the rest of us kept our heads down and hoped for the best.

And bad things really did happen. Homework reduced to confetti, brand-new hats tossed out the window into the snowbanks, pencils jabbed into the backs of kids' hand, girls groped by the bad-boy jocks.

I'm thinking back to that bad old smelly bus (Mr. C's cigars!) after reading a story in today's Washington Post about reported incidents of bullying and sexual assault on school buses in the D.C. suburban area. The story included comments about how in today's sexualized culture, the bus isn't safe like it used to be.

To which I say, the school bus has never been safe -- but we never talked about it. (And of course, it may have gotten worse, as most things seem to do if you read the paper). So let's deal with it -- it's way past time to get some cameras on the schoolbuses already. Inside the schools, we've got metal detectors, security guards, and filters on the Internet. Out on the roads, we've got cameras to keep folks from speeding or running red lights and police using night-vision goggles to make sure people have their seat belts fastened. But somehow, that little yellow schoolbus just keeps rolling along, the Lord of the Flies holding court from the back bench seat.