It probably goes without saying, Academic success is paramount when it comes to your school’s prestige and funding. High test scores, consistent performance, and the teaching of critical thinking skills are valued in schools across the country. However, getting these results can sometimes be a little less straightforward than sitting kids down in a classroom and drilling them on their multiplication, or having them read story after story or write essay after essay. Indeed, the evasive and intangible school pride also plays a role.

School pride means many different things for many different people. For some, it might be working hard and playing hard too. For others, it might be taking a stand in the face of adversity. Either way, it usually involves some form of pride in your institution. It’s a form of embodying your school’s values and feeling good doing it.

For some schools, instilling this multifaceted feeling in their students can be difficult. Kids can very easily tell when something is being forced upon them, and they’ll resent the infringement upon their emotions. Nobody, child or adult, likes to be told to feel a certain way, after all! Therefore, school pride must be instilled from the inside out, and it must happen organically. If not, you’re likely to breed the very opposite of school pride—school resentment, that is!

So how does administration go about creating school pride? Many start with recreating their branding. This consists of their mascot, their school colors, and the like. Other districts invest in everything from bleacher enclosures to giant banners with their school’s accolades displayed proudly across them. Still, others try to foster such attitudes with dramatic school assemblies with everyone from the football team to the cheer squad in attendance. While all of these efforts can be helpful in promoting school pride in some cases, they aren’t always reliable or long-lasting. For example, students can only lay eyes on an awards banner so many times before it just becomes a backdrop to their walk to the cafeteria. Assemblies can, if executed poorly, become known within the student body as just an excuse to get out of class—nothing more. Because school pride is such a difficult thing to pin down, and because each institution has to define it for itself, it can be a difficult thing to achieve for many school districts, no matter how well-intentioned they are and no matter how much they care about student morale.

However, there’s one service you can invest in that infallibly promotes positive vibes and admiration for your district: your school bus services. Northstar Bus Lines, a Maple Grove school bus contractor and provider of group transportation services explain how great student transportation services can contribute to your district’s sense of pride.

How Do You Want Your Students to Start and End Their Days?

Think about it: the first point of contact students have with your institution each and every day is your school bus services. As adults, we’ve all had rough drives to work or gotten stuck in traffic on our way home. If this can turn a decent day into a nightmare for us, imagine what poor-quality student transportation services do for your pupils! In contrast, great school bus services, make sure your students have a positive and joyous start to their days. Of course, that good mood is bound to rub off in how they tackle the scholarly challenges they meet each and every day. Success in their individual pursuits—in what your staff is teaching them—can improve how your students collectively view your school. It goes without saying that positive feelings about an institution are generally a part of that district’s definition of school pride.

As you can see, great school bus services influence the way your students view your school by bookending their days in a positive way. But what else do they do to boost school pride?

• Supportive drivers build relationships with students | Everybody needs somebody who cares about them for the simple sake of caring. Great school buses can provide this relationship for your students in the form of its drivers, who greet and say goodbye to students and keep them safe on the roads—all while spreading happiness. By opening the door for such a positive relationship to form, your school is bound to get some credit from your students.

• Efficient service sets the stage for student success | If a bus is always late or constantly breaking down, the stress it causes can rub off on your students’ ability to concentrate or perform in school. Plus, it isn’t easy to feel good about an institution in which you’re constantly dealing with inconveniences—and in which those inconveniences aren’t even your fault! Great school bus services set students up for morale-boosting success by making sure they never have to worry about getting to school or home on time.

• Sanitary busses inspire students to honor their surroundings | Dirty buses, just like a dirty campus, are no way to foster a sense of pride. With student transportation services that keep their buses clean, you demonstrate to students that you care about and take pride in their learning environment, which inspires a similar caring and prideful attitude in return.

Looking to Bolster School Pride? Talk to Northstar Bus Lines Today

We’ve got the top-notch student transportation services to go alongside your top-notch school. Give our Maple Grove terminal a call now at 763-425-2542.