Jeff Atwood’s daughter, Suzie, is physically and intellectually challenged. She rides the proverbial “short bus” to school. And that is how Jeff refers to it, the Short Bus. But Suzie is getting older and will soon be in middle school. It was in middle school (or junior high as many of us knew it) that Jeff has some troubling memories of the Short Bus:

For a couple of wintertime months during seventh grade, me and a group of my friends would sit on the curb outside Pennwood Junior High School, waiting for the morning bell to ring. Some days, when we got there especially early and had nothing better to do, we would
just sit there on the cold curb, waiting for the “Short Bus” to pull up and drop off the special education students.
I am still not sure why this was such great entertainment, but even so we would just sit there, waiting for the “retards” to arrive. (“Retards” was my word then. I now realize the power of words like that.) Most of the time me and Mike Antonio and the Perry brothers and Terry Ricini would just point and laugh at the handful of kids as they would get off the “Short Bus.” On days when we were really pumped up, some of the guys would try to out do one another by calling them names. “Hey you retard…look over here…what’s the problem, you can’t walk or what?” It was a bonus if we could get a rise out of someone in the group. Seems like it was always Mikey Pulaski starting that talking part.
Sometimes, when the teacher’s aid or bus driver were looking the other way or maybe helping one of the kids down the wheelchair ramp, we would scoop up a crunchy snowball and just wing it across the parking lot at the short bus. Most of the time we didn’t have very good aim and if we were lucky the snowball would hit the side of the bus or maybe the sidewalk. Every now and then one of us, mostly Mike Antonio cause he was a baseball pitcher too, would get lucky and plunk one of the retards. One time Mikey hit one guy in the leg and then before the retard figured out what was going on Mikey busted him in the back too.
But one day, I was the king of the “curb-sitters.” It was the day I hit a “retard” smack up in the face with a snowball. I scooped up a handful of the nasty gray snow, smashed it into an icy rock and fired it across the parking lot. I can still see it now, flying through the sky, almost as if it was in super slow motion.
I heaved that snow bomb towards all those kids and just wished. Bam! Caught the kid in the green coat right in the face.

He goes onto say:

Ohh, how I hate the “R” word now.
I hate it in much the same way I would guess that those kids at my junior high school hated getting laughed at and pelted with snowballs.
I used to think that riding on the short bus was as a badge of dishonor or a label of imperfection. The bus, and the kids who rode that bus, were a never-ending supply of cheap laughs. I have come to know that the short bus really is the exact opposite of all those things that I thought before.

Go read the rest. See how something that is the butt of so many jokes means the world to those who are on it.