By ChicoSol
Nov 12, 2025
Kevin McKay, whose story is retold in the film The Lost Bus, is still rescuing kids seven years after the Camp Fire when he gained the moniker America’s “most famous bus driver.”
Fair View High School’s Kevin McKay recalls the day he got his school bus through the flames with 22 children and two teachers aboard. Here he gazes at the list of names that was made when they were stalled by flames and traffic. Photo by Yucheng Tang.
By Yucheng Tang
Kevin McKay was driving school bus #963 to his Paradise home when he was radioed — just as the film “The Lost Bus” shows — that an empty bus was needed for stranded students at Ponderosa Elementary.
That was the morning of Nov. 8, 2018, when the flames of the Camp Fire that ultimately would claim 85 lives and destroy 11,000 homes were raging through Feather River Canyon toward Paradise. McKay was about to make a decision that would make him one of the most famous school bus drivers in the country.
Part of him wanted to rush home, to alert his mother and son, Shaun, to leave for Chico to escape the fire. But another part of him knew the kids at school were waiting — and they needed him, too.
McKay, now a teacher at the Fair View High continuation school in Chico, had been working as a school bus driver in Paradise for about two months. He took the job to pay the bills and, while attending Butte College to prepare for a teaching career, to see whether he could handle working with kids.
It turned out he not only handled them well, but with the help of two teachers, Mary Ludwig and Abbie Davis, saved their lives.
The Camp Fire reaffirmed his belief that “what defines humanity is those who choose to help others in very difficult situations, and the ability for human beings to give of themselves to help others,” he said.
Former school bus driver Kevin McKay keeps the list of children who were on his bus in the Camp Fire in a drawer at home. Photo by Yucheng Tang.
McKay now dedicates himself to supporting Fair View students who face their own challenges — homelessness, the loss of parents, and family turmoil, for example.
Unlike the taciturn figure portrayed by Matthew McConaughey in the recent Hollywood film, McKay was gentle, expressive and given to laughter while meeting this reporter at his Chico home. The sound of train horns blared in the distance whenever he was going to speak, and at one point he joked, “That’s my buddy on the train.”
Back to the moment when he had to decide which way to go: He looked into the big mirror of his empty bus, anguish haunting him — a feeling he said was well represented in the film — and he pondered for five seconds before making the return call.
“963. My ETA is 2 minutes.”
“I knew what my job was,” McKay said. “I had an empty bus, and I was right next to that school. I had the need to go take care of my son and my mom. But the call came through. I was available, and I responded to the call.”
Navigating students through the landslides in their lives
When McKay was assigned to Fair View High for student teaching in 2020, he was “a little apprehensive at first.”
Fair View students are often at risk of not graduating in a traditional setting. Many of its students are homeless, have lost parents, face mental health challenges, or struggle with addiction.
McKay wondered if he should get his credential at a traditional high school where he would get more of a “standard high school experience.”
He called two people he respects. One was his professor at Chico State, and the other was Mike Lerch, principal of Ridgeview High School, a continuation school in Paradise. To his surprise, both of them told him that Fair View was the exact place he should be.
“They saw in me my capability, my potential and my genuine desire to pour myself into young people,” McKay said.
McKay soon found most of the kids there had a difficult story.
“What’s in their lives is chaos, and that chaos might come from housing,” McKay said. “It might come from relationships, it might come from the parents’ employment situation, it might come from parents’ relationship situations. And what I find is, it comes down on all of them in all of those ways all the time.
“It’s always a landslide.”
His approach is to show more understanding about the challenges they face rather than simply blaming them.
“We might ask them what’s happened to you rather than what’s wrong with you. It’s a very different viewpoint,” McKay said. “The challenges these kids face would have broken most of us, yet that kid is still there, sitting in our classroom, doing everything they can to try to just be in class for the day.”
Still, there have been times that he went home, replayed the tough day in his mind, and felt unsure he could continue to do this job. McKay said some students aren’t always happy with him, and those who are on edge and close to breaking down sometimes take it out on him.
Whenever that happened, he reminded himself of a quote he loves: “The students who need the most love show it in the worst way.”
He loves history, but his favorite class to teach is personal finance and career planning. He thinks that’s something that can prevent the “landslide” from happening.
Before meeting this reporter, he had just finished a busy day. He invited some business owners to class and asked them to do mock interviews with his students, who are “usually nervous about speaking to adults.”
“Part of what we do with the mock interviews is to train them up,” McKay said. “So when they go for that first job interview, it’s not the very first interview they’ve ever had.”
In a college town like Chico, he knows his students need to compete with many other candidates who have better resources and more education.
Next spring, he will start to teach an automotive class in collaboration with Butte College.
Some of his students, he said, “are going to be plumbers, HVAC technicians and construction management people; Some are people that are going to be amazing auto mechanics.”
“My students have the most amazing assets that they don’t know they have,” he said, with a tone of pride. “They will be amazing contributors to our community.”
Michael Bhojak, McKay’s co-worker and mentor at Fair View, told ChicoSol that he has seen McKay offer to help students out personally. “When they were struggling with food or needed some clothes, he would offer to help,” Bhojak said.
Screenshot from “The Lost Bus” website shows actor Matthew McConaughey in the role of Kevin McKay.
“It takes a person with a big heart and a lot of patience and compassion to work with our kids,” he added.
Bhojak watched “The Lost Bus” recently at a theater with McKay. After the movie finished, he gave McKay a hug and “cried on McKay’s shoulder for a few minutes.”
McKay made a resolution to become a teacher after his father passed away in February 2017. He said he was close to his father, whose passing made him realize how fortunate he was to have that kind of relationship with his parents.
“If I needed something, I always had somebody to talk to. I always had somebody to lean on,” McKay said. “And it made me realize how so many young people don’t have somebody in their life that they can count on in that way.”
At the time, he was working at Walgreens as a store manager. He resigned in April 2018, enrolled full time at Butte College to pursue a teaching career, and meanwhile started driving school buses.
“Since the day I made the decision to leave Walgreens and focus on this new chapter of my life, everything has gotten better. Everything felt like I was doing what I was supposed to do. I listened to what God was telling me,” McKay said, his eyes welling up.
Fire: 22 kids, 3 adults and the 4 minutes McKay needed
At the time of the fire, his mother was undergoing treatment for skin cancer and could barely use a walker to get around. She also hadn’t driven a car for two years. The night before the fire, his 10-year-old son was sick and throwing up every hour. When he left for work around 6 a.m. that morning, they were asleep.
McKay was worried.
“I just needed four more minutes before that call came through, and I could have stopped in front of my house, let myself in, told Mom and Shaun, ‘You gotta go.’ Then I could have jumped in the bus and I would have said, ‘Be right there,’” McKay recalled.
There were no four minutes. McKay decided to be “right there” as soon as possible.
While waiting for Ponderosa Elementary to get the last group of children on the bus, he called his mom multiple times. She finally answered.
He asked her to leave the house with Shaun for Chico immediately. She burst into tears. She didn’t know whether she could drive safely.
“Why can’t you come help?”
“Mom, I am evacuating kids right now from a school. I need you to get my son out of town so that I can do what I have to do.”
About half an hour later, when he was already driving the bus loaded with 22 kids, he received Shaun’s message, and Ludwig, one of the two teachers on the bus, read the message for him: “Dad, we are almost in Chico.”
Shaun was in the back seat behind his grandmother, who was nervously driving.
Now McKay could focus on saving the kids, two teachers and himself. Although he was scared, he knew he needed to keep those emotions in check so that the kids on the bus wouldn’t panic.
When he realized they would not get out of town any time soon, he asked the two teachers to make three copies of the roll call sheet in case they needed to divide the students into several groups, each led by an adult. He still keeps that roll sheet, which lists each student’s name along with the three adults’ names and contact numbers, in a drawer at home. At the top of the sheet, it reads, “22 kids. 3 adults.”
Fire damage to the Skyway Villa Mobile Home and RV Park Saturday, Nov. 17, 2018, in Paradise, Calif., which was devastated by the Camp fire. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead) Published under CC License 1.0
He vividly remembers the details of that day. During the interview, he unbuttoned his light pink dress shirt to reveal the gray undershirt beneath, and explained that he had torn a t-shirt like the one he was wearing that was used to make masks for the kids.
The most terrifying moment came when he hit a traffic jam on Roe Road before reaching Neal, which could eventually lead them to Chico. It was a narrow road with thick vegetation overhanging. He had to stop the bus about 400 yards short of the congestion.
They were stuck there for almost half an hour, seeing houses burning. He knew if those cars didn’t move and the fire came, people in the cars would be in danger.
At one point, someone came up to the bus to ask why he had stopped there. He explained that someone needed to direct traffic. That person, along with another person from a car behind them, went to help guide the vehicles, and the cars began to move slowly.
The bus finally could move forward.
After another 15 minutes, McKay and his bus punched through the smoke and saw daylight — just like in the movies.
That was an example of how “normal people” helped other “normal people” during the fire, McKay said.
He emphasized that he was not the only hero that day. Unlike in the film, McKay said, when he asked Ludwig to stay on the bus and take care of the kids, Ludwig said, “I will never leave those kids.”
“Mary knew from the moment an evacuation was called that she was going to stay with those kids and do her job,” McKay said.
McKay hopes one day Paradise Unified School District will celebrate the two teachers’ bravery and commitment.
Film: a shared story for all fire survivors
McKay remembered that when he first watched the movie, he was concerned with inexact details.
“I don’t know if I agree with this and maybe we should change this and maybe we should change that,” he said. “A lot of those things that happen to me on the big screen are kind of a 5 to 10-year picture of my life that’s been compressed into just one day.”
After talking to more and more people who had watched the film, McKay realized the movie is de facto not only about him.
“The moment that the bus punches through the smoke, the moment when they realize that they’re out, (for) everyone that I know who drove out of Paradise that day, that moment is exactly what they connect with,” McKay said.
It’s a shared story of all fire survivors, and a story to honor those who were willing to help others even when they had no good reason to do so, he added.
Yucheng Tang is a California Local News fellow reporting for ChicoSol. This story is part of ChicoSol’s Changemaker profile series.
