It was a long circuitous route from western Ukraine to Pennsylvania, then back to Europe and a school district in need, but help is on the way for school children in that war-torn country.

The Solomonova School District in western Ukraine has seven schools, but five have been kept closed as a new school year begins because those five lack bomb shelters. Transporting those students to the remaining two relatively safe schools is a problem with a shortage of buses.

Earlier this summer, Jamie Orr, a Pottstown car show professional organizer and logistics expert with ties to car maker Volkswagen/Audi, at a meeting in Poland, through a Ukrainian contact, heard of the school district’s need.

Upon returning to the United States, Orr started looking for a used school bus on eBay. What he found was a 20-year-old bus with more than 200,000 miles on its odometer. Orr’s associates dubbed that bus, “a piece of junk.”

Then, mid-summer, Orr was driving around Pottstown in a new pink Volkwagen Atlas SUV to promote breast cancer awareness month.

State Rep. Joe Ciresi, D-146th, representing Montgomery County’s 146th District, happened to see the vehicle and stopped to ask Orr “what’s that all about?”

That casual conversation led to lunch at Ciresi’s favorite Pottstown eatery, during which Orr explained the Ukrainian dilemma and asked Ciresi if he had any contacts who might be helpful in finding a used school bus.

Ciresi did in fact have a contact, Warren Levy Jr., who owns a school bus company serving eastern Pennsylvania for 95 years.

Levy has student transport contracts for the Spring Ford School District, the Quakertown School District and for the Salisbury Township School District as the parent company of Paragon Transit, which has been transporting local students for nearly 20 years.

Levy did better than help with the search. He found a bus in his fleet in good mechanical condition and still has years of useful life left. He decided to donate the bus to the Ukrainian school district.

For the past few weeks, Levy has circulated the bus among his various employee locations, with bus drivers and others using indelible markers, covering the bus with personal words of encouragement, Bible verses and good wishes.

The bus was transported to the Port of Baltimore on the day after Labor Day to be loaded on a vehicle transport ship taking U.S.-made Volkswagen cars to be sold in Europe.

Orr arranged the transit through his Volkswagen contacts. Arriving after a two-week voyage, the vehicles will end up in Germany and the bus will be transported through Poland to the Ukrainian school district.

Levy was asked in a recent interview with a Philadelphia television station what led him to make the magnanimous gesture.

“When your family business has been in a community for 95 years,” he said, “when a neighbor asks for help, you step up when you can.”

Soon the parents of children in the Solomonova School District in Ukraine will see their children boarding an unfamiliar yellow school bus covered with messages of support from America, and know that someone did indeed step up.