Get on the bus: On a typical day in Central Florida, more than 221,000 children ride nearly 291,000 miles on some 3,000 buses.

Byline: Susan Jacobson

Aug. 7--When Louise Brown began driving a bus two decades ago, children respected her authority, Polk County had 180,000 residents, and she could pick up all the middle- and high-school students on her morning route in one trip. Now, kids rarely return Brown's "Good morning," Polk is home to 550,000 people, and Brown can fetch a busload of students in just one of the growing number of subdivisions along her route in the Lake Wales area. "You can make the same amount of stops and fill the bus up a lot sooner," said Brown, a grandmother and Polk native who trains other drivers. "We can go in a subdivision and load a bus."

In Polk, as in the rest of Central Florida, transporting students from home to school and back again is a daunting task involving computerized logistics and hundreds of employees in each district, including bus drivers, dispatchers, routers and call-takers who answer thousands of inquiries from parents and schools as the yearly start…