America celebrates 80 years of ‘School Bus Yellow’

Happy 80th anniversary to “School Bus Yellow,” which became the uniform color of America’s fleet of school buses in 1939.

Dr. Frank W. Cyr, an education professor at Teachers College, part of Columbia University in New York City, is widely regarded as the “Father of the Yellow School Bus.”

His grant-supported work ranks among the most important pieces of research in the history of academia.

The Rockefeller Foundation awarded Dr. Cyr $5,000 in 1937 ($87,400 in today’s inflation-adjusted economy) to go out and study ways to improve rural education and transportation. It proved to be an excellent and worthwhile investment.

Dr. Cyr found that children were riding to school in all kinds of vehicles, ranging from horse-drawn wheat wagons to trucks and buses of all different sizes and colors (one district, hoping to instill patriotism in the children, painted its buses red, white and blue).

Freelance writer Ryan Lee Price of Corona, Calif., dug deeper into Dr. Cyr’s findings related to the shortcomings of rural school transportation. He reported that Dr. Cyr said the situation was “terrible.”

In the late 1930s, each state had its own standards for school transportation vehicles, and “the manufacturers had to cope with the differing rules, requirements and tastes from 48 states. For every different color, the bus companies had to have different booths to spray-paint them,” Dr. Cyr said. This was a huge kink in the economies that could be achieved in “assembly line mass production.”

Dr. Cyr completed his analysis and organized a conference in 1939 on the Columbia University campus, drawing in school administrators and transportation officials from all 48 states as well as key stakeholders, such as specialists from the school bus manufacturing and paint companies, Price reported.

Delegates met for seven days and agreed on 44 school bus safety standards, including specifications regarding body length, ceiling height, aisle width, axles and brakes. The outcome was a 42-page pamphlet containing the nation’s first school bus safety standards.

The most significant development from the 1939 conference was an agreement concerning a uniform color for the school bus vehicles. Officially, the delegates settled on a hue that is now known as “National School Bus Glossy Yellow.”

The conference delegates described the tone as a “warm orangish-yellow,” not to be confused with a warmly yellowish-orange.

Color does matter, explained Jill Morton of Honolulu, a noted color psychologist and branding expert.

She says: “The yellow family of colors gets your attention faster than any other color. People notice yellow objects first.”

“Even when you are looking straight ahead, you can see a yellow object that is not in front of you ‘in the corners of your eyes’ much sooner than any other color, even red. Scientists say lateral peripheral vision for detecting yellows is 1.24 times greater than for red.”

The yellow family is also regarded as the easiest to see in the semi-darkness of early morning and late afternoon, the times of day when the school buses tended to be “out and about.”

In 1989, Columbia University celebrated the 50-year anniversary of Dr. Cyr’s contribution to the nation. Columbia’s President Philip Michael Timpane said the 1939 school bus conference was “truly a milestone event in the annals of American education.”

“It is hard to imagine today any area of education policy where you could gather any number of people in one room and cause such a national change to occur,” he said.

The “School Bus Yellow” paint color was incorporated in 1956 within the Federal Standard Color System, which essentially is the U.S. government’s official paint color palette. The color was labeled first as 13432 but later as 13415. (They look the same to my eye.)

The most comparable color to “School Bus Yellow” in the Pantone Matching System (PMS) for ink colors used in the graphics arts and printing industries is 123-C. Within the Hex Code system, key in ffd800, to see how “School Bus Yellow” looks to designers who work on the digital media and website design side.

Dagnabbit. Wouldn’t you know it? “School Bus Yellow” is included in the rainbow of colors offered in the bigger boxes of Crayola crayons.

William Cyr who, as a child, asked his father the professor, “If you’re the father of the yellow school bus, what does that make me?”

Dr. Cyr replied: “Whenever you see a school bus pass by, you could say, “There goes one of my brothers or sisters.”