LEWISTON – Sue Weber walked into Rite Aid, spotted the enormous cardboard cutout of kids sticking silly faces out a bus window, advertising a back-to-school sale, and wanted it.

She asked nicely, persistently, and the manager relented. Her husband hung it up in her Lewiston Middle School classroom. She covered the sale chatter with class rules. Perfect.

It went just right with her school bus collection.

Weber, 53, is starting her eighth year as a literacy teacher for eighth-graders. During an intensive, one-year program to get her teaching certificate, she bought herself a little school bus key chain as a symbol of her new profession. (She didn’t want to go the apple route.)

One bus led to another.

“I think buses are happy. It’s a happy collection, I don’t know why,” she said. “I just think buses are like smiley faces.”

Sixty of them, mostly Matchbox size, fill several shelves in the corner of her second-floor classroom. They’re each unique, sometimes ever-so-slightly, with different names lettered on the side, different wheels, varying numbers of windows. A few are tricked out with monster tires.

Bigger buses serve as a tape dispenser and hold highlighters, scissors, markers and candy.

Weber’s got a photo of a stretch-limo painted up like a school bus and would love to have a toy of it, if one exists.

At the start, she kept her buses in the classroom chalk tray. That didn’t last. Its dips and curves were too tempting to use as ramps by playful, stunt-minded hands: “Now I have to give firm instructions: They are to look at, not to move.”

She’s found lots of them at yard sales.

“Right now, I don’t think I could go into any store and find something I don’t have,” Weber said. She picked up a bus found a few days before: “It was the last garage sale of the day and there it was – and it was a nickel.”

The collection gets a good dusting and then gets packed away at the end of every school year. She just unearthed them a few weeks ago, getting ready to teach again.

When students ask about the buses, she’ll make up stories: that she wants to be a bus driver when she grows up; that she used to be one.

In truth, she likes collecting little things. Within reason.

“I’m off everything but (miniature) tea sets and this,” she said.

During the first day of school on Tuesday, Weber got an earful about the collection from new students.

“It was amazing. I’ve never had kids have so many comments and questions,” she said.