Ok no, we didn’t actually lose a school bus.

We don’t even have any school buses.

But I was at a camp conference a couple of weeks ago and the closing keynote speaker, Michael Smerconish, said five words that stuck out instantly.

“We’ve lost the school bus.”

Compared to what most adults will remember, so many fewer kids ride the bus to school these days. They mostly get dropped off. Picked up. Shuttled from place to place.

But this isn’t about the bus, specifically.

The bus is a metaphorical stand-in for all the places kids used to just show up and mix. For this, you could replace school bus with places like the park on weekends, the mall on a Saturday night, or the neighborhood when things got boring inside.

It’s all the places you might run into other kids who you didn’t make a plan to see, or might not have had occasion to talk to before.

A bus ride might be thirty minutes on the way there and thirty minutes back, mixing with the kids who just got on.

The bus rolled through different neighborhoods in town. Who sat next to who wasn’t always a choice.

Now everything is a little (no, a lot) more curated. Organized activities and schedules and peer groups are everywhere.

Was it all amazing on the school bus? Not necessarily. But some of the good stuff that happened there got left behind.

The Space Camp Fills

I’ve started thinking of camp as a bonus neighborhood.

A place where kids show up and mix with people from different cities, different backgrounds, different everything.

Last summer, we had campers from 376 zip codes (yes, we counted). Just in Texas, that’s from cities and areas around Austin, Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, Midland, and more. All in the same cabins.

The cabin is the school bus.

It’s just the people who showed up. You might have requested a friend, but you didn’t get to choose the whole group. And that’s a good thing.

We’re politically diverse. We’re religiously diverse. Though honestly, even mentioning it is funny to me because during the summer, none of that ever even comes up. It’s not something to manage.

Kids make friends first, and then maybe later realize their new friend is from somewhere totally different.

By then, any difference in almost anything doesn’t matter. They already like each other.

A Skill That Travels

I think it’s an increasingly valuable skill to feel comfortable around people who are from different backgrounds or have different points of view. To walk into a new group and not already know what everyone thinks. To figure out the room instead of assuming who’s in it.

That represents a specific type of resilience.

A few weeks ago, we wrote about dropping kids off at college for the first time. This is part of what that moment requires. Walking into a dorm full of strangers from everywhere and figuring out how to connect. Campers who have practiced this will be ready. Kids who haven’t might have a harder time.

And it goes beyond college. First day at a new job. Moving to a new city. Joining a rec league team where you don’t know anyone.

If you don’t have this skill, your world gets smaller. If you do, your world gets a lot bigger.

Camp builds this. One cabin, one summer at a time.

Kids learning to connect with whoever shows up. Discovering that different doesn’t mean difficult. Practicing the skill of walking into a new room and finding their place.

We may have lost the school bus. But we can still find this.

Erec Sir