2 teachers transformed an old bus into a 1970s-inspired classroom-on-wheels for under $10,000
Debanjali Bose
- In June 2020, Jerilee Melo started tutoring groups of preschool kids in an old bus.
- A few months later, Brittany Jeltema, a former high-school teacher, gave the classroom a makeover.
- Take a look inside the colorful mobile classroom.
Jerilee Melo has taught preschool for the last five years and has been working with children for over 15 years.
Melo told Insider that before the coronavirus pandemic, she taught a class of 24 preschool students in Santa Clarita, California, with the help of an assistant.
As pandemic lockdowns started and she moved away from teaching in a brick-and-mortar classroom setting, some of the families of her former students reached out to her. They told her that their kids missed being in school and asked if she could tutor them.
"So, I was tutoring three families on separate days, but my car just eventually became a storage unit," Melo said. "I was bringing all my materials with me."
Her car was overflowing with "worksheets, crayons, markers, and puzzles" for her lessons to the point that, Melo said, it just made sense to buy a bus. It afforded her a bigger space that could comfortably hold all her teaching materials — and would eventually become her classroom.
Melo bought a Ford E450 Super Duty bus in June 2020 on Facebook marketplace.
Melo, who had been driving her Nissan Cube around for her tutoring job up until that point, saw the bus online and thought it looked kind of like her car, "but on a much bigger scale."
She bought the bus for $5,500 and paid a local carpenter another $2,000 to install some wooden benches for her students to sit on during lessons.
But, aside from the benches, the bus was still pretty bare-bones.
A few months into starting her mobile classroom, Melo reached out to Brittany Jeltema, a former high-school teacher who regularly gives classrooms around the country makeovers.
Six months into using the bus as her classroom, Melo reached out to the Ohio-based Jeltema for help with decorating it.
"She's done some amazing class flips and makeovers in the past," Melo told Insider, referencing some of Jeltema's past classroom projects.
Jeltema, in turn, told Insider that Melo's unique setup convinced her to make the cross-country trip from Ohio to California with her crew to do the flip.
"She wanted to turn her preschool space into a mobile classroom and I was like, 'this is an incredible opportunity to try something completely new and out of the typical classroom space,'" she said.
Jeltema and her team took about four days to give the bus a makeover. They added murals to the outside, and storage, wallpaper, bookshelves, toys, and proper seating to the inside.
Jeltema said she had help from about four friends and family members, including her wife and her mom, to help her renovate the bus.
They worked long hours, usually starting at around 6 a.m, and stayed inside the bus working on renovations until it was dark outside. At night, they would usually put the furniture for the classroom together at their Airbnb or fine-tune the design and layout.
While she's not comfortable with publicly sharing exactly how much the renovations for the bus cost, Jeltema says it was less than $10,000 and all "volunteer work."
Jeltema said her goal with the renovation was not just to make the bus look aesthetically pleasing for Melo and her students, but to also make it functional.
While the finished product, the renovated classroom on-the-go, was a surprise for Melo, she let Jeltema know early on that she wanted the decor of the bus to feel like "a '70s road trip through California."
To fit the theme, Jeltema hired Hanna Daly, a Los Angeles-based mural artist, to add bold, bright colors and floral patterns on the outside of the bus. The same aesthetic is replicated inside with colorful throw pillows, wallpaper, and seat cushions.
In addition to giving the bus the kind of decor Melo wanted, Jeltema also wanted to add elements that would make Melo's job easier and the classroom safer, including childproof locks on the storage containers.
As soon as you step into the bus, there's an organization space to your left with shelves and trays.
The area has little cubbies and containers for toys, markers, and art supplies.
Next to the organization space is a "bench" that doubles as more storage for Melo and her students.
Jeltema told Insider this storage bench was one of her favorite additions to the bus.
Right above the bench is a row of white cabinets. Jeltema told Insider that she's especially proud of how this area turned out because the curved roof of the bus made the process challenging.
While Jeltema and her team didn't make the white cabinets from scratch, they had to do some additional carpentry to properly anchor the cabinets to the curved roof of the bus.
"We had to use a jigsaw to cut the top of the shelf into a curve," Jeltema told Insider. "And then, of course, there's not like any wood on the bus that you can drill into."
"So then we had to use a whole bunch of different strips and that kind of thing to make sure that it's secure and won't fall," she continued.
Jeltema added that this particular addition took "a lot of patience."
The back wall of the bus has removable wallpaper and bookshelves.
The wallpaper is bright and floral, much like the mural on the outside of the bus.
At the opposite end of the vehicle, towards the very front, a magnetic wall separates the classroom from the driver's area.
The main purpose of this wall, which doubles as a dry erase board, is to make sure the kids don't go to the driver's area and touch any buttons they're not supposed to.
Jeltema also sanded down the benches that Melo had initially installed and stained and painted them.
They also added brightly-colored cushions to the chairs and a table with plexiglass so the students can display their art projects.
This is what the seating area looked like before Jeltema's makeover.
Aside from the storage and the classroom setup, Jeltema also added toys for the kids to play with, like a fake kitchen area and a table that is both a dry erase board and a Lego mat.
There's a bungee cord for the kitchen and the table to keep them secure when Melo is driving the bus.
As of March, Melo was tutoring four groups of preschool kids in her brand new classroom-on-the-go. The biggest group has five students and the smallest one has two students.
The groups meet at a previously agreed-upon spot that Melo drives to and parks at for the duration of the lesson. The bus is never on-the-move when the kids are on board.
After she's done tutoring for the day, Melo parks the mobile classroom overnight in a storage unit.
Melo says that while buying a bus and driving it around might be "unique and extreme," teachers work hard every day to create an environment that students deserve.
Melo told Insider that it is not unusual for teachers to spend time and their own money to create the best classroom environment possible for their students.
"Mine just happens to be on a set of wheels," she added.
You can follow along with Melo's mobile-teaching adventures over at @theclassroomtogo on Instagram.
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