Who Says It’s A Man’s World?
WOMEN OVERCOME ATTITUDINAL HURDLES TO SUCCEED AS SCHOOL BUS TECHNICIANS
WRITTEN BY ART GISSENDANER I
Technician Dawn Lair charges a school bus battery for her school district near Sacramento, Calif.
n her nearly three decades as a mechanic, Dawn Lair has had to prove herself time and again to some
pretty tough audiences. But she was blind-sided by one of her unsus- pecting and toughest critics one day while working at her current job as fleet mechanic in the Live Oak School District in northern California. She was picking up her 6-year-old
son, Steven, from school when she got a call that a bus had broken down about 10 miles from her location. Lair had little choice but to take Ste- ven along on the call. She arrived at the scene, got the bus running again and decided to follow it back to the bus barn in case it suffered a relapse. It was slow going, and Steven
became restless. He finally asked his mother if they could go around the bus and just go home. “I said, ‘No, I want to stay with the
bus in case it breaks down again’,” Lair recalled. Whereupon little Steven replied, “Well, if it breaks down again, can’t they just call a real mechanic?”
Tis snapshot of a day in the life
of Lair could lead one to believe that a sexist attitude is part of the male DNA and can surface at any time (or age), no matter what their relation- ship is to the female. However, Joni
Dupille, fleet mechanic in the Penin- sula School District in Gig Harbor, Wash., has proof that these attitudes are not restricted to males. Dupille, who has been a fleet
mechanic for eight years, said her 13-year-old daughter, Abby, had a bit of a struggle owning up to her mother’s profession. “For the longest time she wouldn’t
tell anyone what I did for a living,” Dupille said. “She said people looked at her kind of strange when she said her mother was a mechanic. She said, ‘Other moms are teachers or work at Nordstrom’s. Ten, I say my mom is a mechanic. Tat’s what a dad does, that’s not what a mom does’.” Dupille said her husband, David, is fine with her occupation because of the perks. He’s able to borrow wrenches from her to work on his boat and his car. “I have to make sure I get them
back,” she added. “I have a full repertoire of wrenches. Now, instead of buying $300 shoes, I buy $300 wrenches.” Meanwhile, Lair now reports that
her son has finally come around to accepting Mom as a bona fide auto- motive technician, possibly with an ulterior motive. “Oh, he loves it now because he’s
in college and I can work on his car for free,” she said.
www.stnonline.com 49
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