The History of How School Buses Became Yellow

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Children cross the street in front of a yellow school bus in 1965.<br>H. Armstrong Roberts / ClassicStock via Getty Images

In a 1939 issue of American Childhood, the lyrics to the song, “The Wheels on the Bus,” made their first public appearance. Songwriter Verna Hills composed verses that celebrated the routine of traveling on a bus, closing each with the phrase, “over the city streets.” Likely unbeknownst to her, at that same time 80 years ago, school transportation officials from each and every state gathered in New York to decide what that bus, with its wheels going “’round and ’round” and its horn going “beep beep beep,” would look like.

The brainchild of education expert Frank Cyr, the meeting at Columbia University carried the goal of establishing national construction standards for the American school bus. Two years earlier, Cyr had conducted a ten-state study where he found that children were riding to school in trucks and buses of all different colors, and even horse-drawn wagons, in the case of one Kansas school district he visited. Standardization would solve two problems and simultaneously revolutionize school buses themselves: one, being uniformly one color would make bus travel safer; two, costs to districts would be lower as construction specifications would make it possible for manufacturers to mass-produce buses.

At the time of the conference, Cyr had more than 30 years of experience with rural schools. Born in 1900 in a sod house in Nebraska’s Republican River Valley, Cyr and his fellow classmates, like many rural students, traveled great distances to school. After attending Grinnell College and graduating from the University of Nebraska with a bachelor’s degree in agriculture, Cyr spent nearly a decade in country schools, first as a teacher in Winner, South Dakota, then, as a school superintendent in Chappell, Nebraska. In promoting school-bus standardization and greater use of the buses in rural areas, Cyr saw an opportunity for rural school districts to save resources through consolidation. The Rockefeller-backed General Education Board provided Cyr $5000 ($92,000 in 2019) to study local school-bus needs and bring together the various parties who could effectuate needed changes.

Students at Greenbank Consolidated School in West Virginia board school buses in 1921.<br>Lewis W. Hine / National Child Labor Committee collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

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A 1939 Dorothea Lange photograph of children boarding a school bus in Malheur County, Oregon.<br>Dorothea Lange / Library of Congress

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A new school bus picks up students at a farmworkers' community in Indio, California, in 1941.<br>Harriet Huntington Hope / Library of Congress

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An "old school bus" photographed in North Dakota in 1937.<br>Russell Lee / Library of Congress

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Speaking at a luncheon commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1939 school-bus conference, Cyr recalled that some school districts, by the time of the conference, had already adopted yellow as their school-bus color. Others, though, wanted to paint their buses red, white, and blue. He said at the time, “Red, white and blue was camouflage, if you think about it. It was to make kids patriotic. It was well-meaning, but they made the buses less visible. And I don’t think it really had much effect on patriotism.”

During those seven days of deliberation in the Grace Dodge Room at Columbia Teachers College, Cyr said he hung strips of different paint colors from the wall, in “50 shades ranging from lemon yellow to deep orange-red.” The conference attendees, which included representatives of the bus manufacturing industry, selected a small group to make the final color selection, and the orangish-yellow color they chose has been the industry standard ever since. Initially christened National School Bus Chrome (a reference to the lead-chromate yellow in the original paint), the United States General Services Administration (GSA) now calls the color National School Bus Glossy Yellow, or Color 13432 in the Federal Standard 595a color collection that GSA uses for government procurement. The National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA), the federal agency that regulates bus safety, states on its website that federal law does not require school buses to be yellow, as “State and local governments establish policy for student transportation, including how buses should be identified.” Instead, NHTSA encourages states to adopt its voluntary guidelines on operational safety, like Guideline 17, which “recommends that school buses be painted ‘National School Bus Glossy Yellow.’”

“The yellow is not pure spectral yellow,” says Ivan Schwab, clinical spokesperson at the American Academy of Ophthalmology. “The best way to describe [the color] would be in wavelength,” says Schwab. The wavelength of the popular school-bus...