Every day at 4 a.m., Geneva Summerville gets into “protector mode.”

On her drive from Starkville to Columbus each morning, she doesn’t listen to music or podcasts. She’s thinking through the day’s bus routes, whether a driver might call in sick and who to call first to fill that gap.

Summerville stays in that mode until all the Columbus Municipal School District buses are parked and checked to ensure each student got off – somewhere around 7 p.m. each school day.

“I never stop worrying because I’m over so many kids, so many precious kids,” said Summerville, transportation director for CMSD. “… I know how I was about my kids, so I can imagine how people are about their kids.”

Summerville’s days on the bus started like most, as a student. She attended both Joe Cook and Stokes-Beard elementary schools before graduating from Lee High in 1984. From there, she joined the workforce, starting in food services.

But as a single-mother raising three children, Summerville needed a job with a more flexible schedule, which in 1996 led her right back to CMSD where she started driving a school bus.

“My kids were in school, so they would go with me on the bus in the morning time, and I would drop them off at school,” she said. “Then I would go and work in the cafeteria. I laid it out … where I would be at home in the evening with my kids.”

The new job worked out perfectly, so much so that she kept it for more than a decade, even in 2000 as she began taking night classes at the East Mississippi Community College extension at Columbus Air Force Base. In 2006, she graduated from Mississippi University for Women with a bachelor’s degree in family science, honoring a promise she had made to herself to go to college as her children began graduating high school.

Even as she continued her education – pursuing a master’s degree at the University of West Alabama – into 2008, Summerville kept driving for CMSD.

After she finished her master’s degree, Summerville started working as transportation supervisor with Waters Truck and Tractor, to which CMSD outsourced its transportation department. She continued to work in transportation for a few more years but then felt the call to try something new.

Summerville had always been interested in health care, so she left the transportation department and spent time working as a certified nurse assistant, then a travel nurse.

“Right around the COVID time is when I took my first flight on a plane, and I went to my first assignment … in Butler, Pennsylvania – my first time ever being so far away from home,” she said. “I had grown kids at the time, so I would say that … I was living my best life.”

Coming back home

When she started travel nursing, Summerville promised herself and her kids she’d only do it for five years. Before that mark arrived at the start of this year, she had worked stints everywhere from Pennsylvania to Colorado to New Hampshire, building friendships with patients and coworkers along the day.

“Every facility that I walked in, they hated to see me go,” she said. “I had that attitude. I had that (commitment). … Even now, everywhere I step into, it’s just like, when are you coming back. … All the patients just love me, and I love them.”

When she saw CMSD’s advertisement for a new transportation director, Summerville wasn’t interested at first. But when the opportunity kept coming back to her, she took the leap and was offered the job.

Now she spends her day-to-day coordinating buses and drivers and sometimes even driving a route if need be.

“Right now, my biggest compassion is the kids that I oversee every day on the bus (and) my drivers. (I) want to make sure everybody is OK,” she said.
She encourages her drivers to take the same care as they run their routes each day.

“I instill in my drivers: every child that gets up on your bus, greet them with a, ‘Good morning. How was your day? How was your night? Do you need anything?’” she said. “Some kids, you never know what night they had, or what’s going on in the home, and I want my drivers to … leave it open so if there’s anything going on, they can come and talk to them.”

Superintendent Craig Chapman said Summerville has been a “great asset” for CMSD, especially as it started the school year with a full roster of bus drivers and substitute drivers – no small feat during a national bus driver shortage.

“(She is) very understanding of the role and what it takes as far as making sure that we’re in compliance with our drivers on transporting kids,” he said. “… A lot of things that we may have not totally been used to and aware of that she’s bringing to our attention that we can go back and fix. (She’s) a great addition to the team.”

For Summerville, it’s all about caring for others, whether it’s the students riding CMSD buses today or their parents, who once rode her own bus. After nearly three decades of ensuring students make it on and off the bus safely, there’s one request Summerville makes of other drivers on the road.

“If I could just get everybody to acknowledge these bus stop signs,” she said.

McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.