SATIRE: This is parody. Not a real news report.
LA JOYA, TEXAS — Having completed the greatest journey of their careers — one glorious, one-way drive down from Houston — the 18 newest members of La Joya ISD’s roughly 150-bus fleet have entered retirement at the district transportation yard, where they will sit until titles and license plates arrive granting them permission to move again, officials confirmed Monday.
The buses, purchased for $2,794,600, represent the district’s largest-ever investment in vehicles whose entire service record is a single afternoon on the interstate. Six are special-education units. All 18 come with three-point seatbelts, interior cameras surveilling rows of seats that have never held a backpack, and a dash cam pointed at a windshield pointed at a chain-link fence.
“Smell that? That’s $2.8 million of new-bus scent,” said Renata Falcón, the district’s Director of Fleet Anticipation, giving a yard tour. “The shifter is a knob now. A knob! Nobody touches the knob unless they place top five on the rubric.”
District Ranks Drivers For Buses That Cannot Legally Turn On
The new buses will be assigned to top-ranked drivers under a rubric scoring safety record, fuel efficiency and inspection scores — a ranking system Falcón defended as “completely fair, since all 18 candidates are equally parked.” Veteran drivers have begun preparing anyway. Gilberto “Chuy” Peña, a 19-year veteran currently ranked first, spends his lunch breaks in one of the district’s 138 older buses — still legally allowed to be a bus — practicing knob turns on a slow-cooker dial zip-tied to his steering column.
“That new bus is mine. The rubric says so. The state of Texas says wait,” Peña said, buffing a fingerprint off his current dashboard. “I’ve scheduled two weeks of deep-cleaning out of respect for whichever one I get.”
Officials Confident Paperwork Will Beat The New-Bus Smell
Administrators are optimistic the plates will arrive within “a couple of weeks,” a timeline insiders describe as a race between the Texas titling process and the slow evaporation of the fleet’s most valuable asset. The buses are also earmarked for trips north of the Valley — a plan Falcón called “phase two, after phase one, which is the plates.” Until then, the yard will host twice-daily viewings, and motorists on Expressway 83 are asked to honk supportively but not too loudly, because the buses are resting.
“People ask why we don’t just drive them,” Falcón said, patting a fender that was warm from doing absolutely nothing. “And I tell them the same thing I tell the state: you don’t put miles on a Picasso.”
