Yellow as a No. 2 pencil, a school bus rolls up and down Eddystone’s working-class streets one gray morning. It’s an odd sight in the time of COVID-19. Many of the kids in the Ridley School District, which includes about 10 communities, including Eddystone, are learning remotely these days. So who’s on the bus? Turns out, driver Donna Sullivan has but one passenger: Joanne Coskey, a 53-year-old district kitchen worker and bus aide whom everyone calls the “Energizer Bunny,” briskly delivering breakfasts and lunches to students’ homes with unflagging vigor five days a week. “Thank you,” parents and children yell from porches and windows, but the kinetic Coskey’s already gone, bopping onto School Bus No. 39 and readying a food bundle for the next in a total of 84 stops. The bus is one of 10 delivering to 675 kids that same day. Marrying the commitment to feed students with the desire to put pandemic-sidelined school bus drivers and aides back to work, the Ridley School District hit on a plan that helps all of them at once. The meals it dispatches run the gamut of free, reduced-price, and full-pay.

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Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer, www.inquirer.com, Sept. 30, 2020.