Traffic is light and the sun still below the horizon as Penny Scrivner eases her yellow school bus to a stop in front of a Clackamas County apartment complex at 6:30 one recent morning.

Baby strollers sit in front of many doors, and toys litter the grass. Scrivner peers through the bus window, looking for activity.

Community Transitional School
Where: 6601 N.E. Killingsworth St.

Contact: 503-249-8582

Learn more: transitionalschool.org
"I never know if anyone will be here when I arrive," she says. "Last week, I came to get a seventh-grader, and he was gone."

She shakes her head. "Just vanished," she says. "I hope he's OK."

Scrivner, a retired Greyhound bus driver and former long-haul trucker, is one of four bus drivers for Portland's Community Transitional School, a private institution for students from homeless and poor families, nearly all of whom lead nomadic lives.

Together, the drivers rack up more than 1,300 miles a month, following routes that take them to cheap 82nd Avenue motels, domestic violence shelters, church basements and low-income apartments. Some kids live in cars.

Scrivner came to the Clackamas County complex to pick up the children of a single mother. Last year, the family moved 46 times.

Scrivner inches the bus through a large puddle to create a dry path from the apartment door to the warm bus.

"I'm not going to make those kids walk through that," Scrivner says.

An apartment door opens.

"All the kids on this bus are special," Scrivner says, adding that the bus will carry 22 kids this day, a full load. "I've picked up kids waiting on street corners. They don't have an address. I just know they'll be standing there waiting."
View photos of Penny Scrivner's bus

Scrivner has worked at the school for 18 months. At 64, she had planned to retire this year. The kids on the bus asked her to stay.

She spots a child in the apartment doorway and waves.

"I thought my life was tough," she says. "Then I saw how these kids lived."

She yanks on a handle to open the bus door.

"I see myself in these kids," she says. Her single mother abandoned Scrivner and two siblings when Scrivner was 2, and the children went to grandparents. After bouncing around a few California towns the extended family moved to Klamath Falls.

"I had a place to live," she says with a shrug. "But it was no picnic."

A small girl struggles up the bus steps.

"Hi, Penny," the girl calls as her brothers and sisters run toward the bus.

"I don't care where you all sit," Scrivner calls out in a no-nonsense voice more Greyhound than school bus. "Just be quiet."

When the last girl gets on, Scrivner closes the door.

"Penny," the girl asks, "can I have a hug?"

"Oh, honey," Scrivner says, "yes you can."

Satisfied, the girl buckles her seat belt and looks out the window. There's no one waving goodbye.

"Penny," she says, "I'm glad you drive this bus."

"Honey," Scrivner says, "I'm glad you're on this bus."

Then they're off for the next stop, a child's home at a motel.

The Community Transitional School was founded in 1990 and serves kids who live in school districts across the Portland metro area, says Marcia Harris, the school's development coordinator. The U.S. has about 40 similar schools, including one in Seattle.

About 10 percent of the school's budget comes from Multnomah County, the rest from grants, foundations, businesses, churches and private donations. The school moved into a permanent home -- a clean, cheerful building on Northeast Killingsworth Street -- in 2008. One of its services is providing the kids with free breakfast and lunch.

Harris, who helps write grant applications, says she's read studies that show it takes a student who changes school in midyear as long as six months to recover academically.

"The damage is cumulative," she says. "Those who fall behind fall further behind. When they get older, they deal with self-doubt and feel they don't measure up to their peers. Keeping kids in one school is critical."

Without the school, she says, the children would have to transfer every time they moved from one neighborhood to another, or from one district to the next. And that could happen every few weeks.

"Eventually, they'd fall through the cracks," Harris says. "They'd just give up."

Students don't just show up, though. The school looks for them, says Juli Osa, outreach coordinator. Some are referred by social service agencies, counselors and other parents at the school. Osa also hands out fliers at motels along 82nd, Sandy Boulevard and Interstate Avenue.

"The first time I was out there, I had no idea that families stayed in these motels," she says. "But at least they have a roof over their heads."

Once a child is enrolled, the school does everything possible to make sure the child gets to school and back home --wherever that may be. Kids are picked up throughout the city as well as in Troutdale, Gresham and sections of Clackamas and Washington counties.

Everything begins with the buses. The monthly fuel bill runs $1,000.

The routes change weekly, sometimes daily. Bus coordinator Tom Lechner works from a thick book, preparing routes as if he were a general planning a battle.

"Sometimes it's overwhelming to think about what these families are going through," he says. "It's so unstable and unlike any of my experience growing up."

Some move because of violence at home. Or they've been staying in another family's apartment, and the landlord boots them out. Or they can no longer afford even a cheap motel room.

The one constant is the school, which typically serves 200 students ranging in age from 5 to 14. Lechner takes calls from parents, grandparents or shelter staff.

"I get a call with a new address," he says. "I don't often get the details of why. There are so many things going on in these lives. They just want their child to get to school the next morning."

He flips through the pages.

"So that's what we do," he says. "We get them to school."

During her stint as a driver, Scrivner has made sure some of the children had something to eat.

"I'm never going to be rich," she says. "A few bucks out of my pocket isn't going to hurt me."

At a motel on 82nd, a tired mother in bedroom slippers opens an office door and leads a boy to the bus. She's gone by the time the bus door closes.

Terante Mitchell, 14, has been riding Scrivner's bus throughout the year. He has moved 10 times since arriving in Portland and lived in Texas, California and Georgia before that.

"But at least I get to go to the same school," he says. "In those other places, I didn't like to move. I'd get used to a school and then have to go."

A girl near the front of the bus tells Scrivner she's tired. When Scrivner asks why, the girl says she didn't sleep the night before.

"I was sleeping in the living room and had to share a blanket," she says. "I was so cold. The front door doesn't shut too good. Every time someone gets mad, the door gets slammed. It's broken."

At a small apartment complex, Scrivner waits and waits for a boy to appear.

"He's gone, Penny," a boy in the bus calls out. "I think he's living at his grandmother's."

Scrivner puts the bus in gear.

As the bus approaches a shelter in the basement of a Southeast Portland church, Terri Boshell, 14, says she has spent time there. "They have a bunch of bunk beds in the basement," she says.

The girl has attended the school for five years, through eight moves.

"It's not easy," she says. "We put our stuff in storage and then go to a shelter."

A boy tells Scrivner that he's moved six times in Portland. He has a sister in Texas and an 18-year-old brother in Portland, though no one has seen him in three weeks.

Before the bus arrives at the school, Luke Akins, 9, tells Scrivner that he and his mother will move from a shelter.

"It closes in three weeks," he says. "My mom said we're moving. She knows where we are going."

He thought for a moment. "But I don't," he says.

Scrivner keeps her eyes on the road.

"Don't you worry, honey," she says. "I'll find you."

It sounds bad but its not new . haveing kids is one thing you don't a test for , to bad really .

Moral of the story: Don't have kids if you can't afford them. Its THAT simple.