REPEAT PERFORMANCE
Q&A WITH DON CARNAHAN, WHO WILL TAKE THE REIGNS AS NAPT PRESIDENT AT THE END OF THIS WEEK
WRITTEN BY SYLVIA ARROYO School Transportation News: As incoming
president of NAPT for a second time, what would you like to do differently compared to your first presidency? What initiatives are you interested in introducing or pursuing?
Carnahan: I feel pretty good about my first
term. We initiated a lot of new things that hadn’t been done before that were pretty good efforts, and I would hope that we can get a similar number of objectives accomplished in my second term. The way I would like to see this proceed is: Number one, NAPT has an excellent staff and an excellent executive director. There’s more staff there now than when I was president the first time. They do a great job. Part of the role of the board is to try to make it as easy as possible for NAPT staff to carry out their responsibilities, and I think we’re in really good shape there. I’m always big on having cooperation and
collaboration for the good of the industry from all of the players. It’s important for all the national associations to try to work together on as many issues as possible.
STN: What were some major issues in student
transportation when you were first president of NAPT that still impact the industry today?
Carnahan: There are some differences, but M
ost people in the school bus industry know Don Carnahan. If you don’t, you should. After 40 years of experience in executive management and leadership positions in the
education and pupil transportation, the incoming president of NAPT knows a lot of where the industry has been and where it is headed. He was first president of NAPT from 1997 to 1999, but before that
was president of NASDPTS from 1991 to 1993, when he was state director of pupil transportation for Washington state. He was chair of the National Standards Conference for School Transportation from 1986 through January 1996, was inducted into the NAPT Hall of Fame in 2006 and received the STN Leadership Award at NAPT two years ago. The list goes on. He’s been with Zonar Systems since 2003 as VP of business development. STN spoke with Carnahan right before the NAPT Summit to talk about the past and the future of pupil transportation.
16 THE SHOW REPORTER • OCT 18-24, 2013
the availability of resources to do what you need to do to get the job done. It’s always been a challenge. It seems as though the funding mechanisms for pupil transportation always create some issues for local districts. That re- sults with the school district needing to supple- ment the funding to make the system operate the way it’s supposed to operate. That’s still going on today. People are still dealing with that issue, and I suppose that’s going to be a way of life for pupil transportation forever. Another thing is the price of fuel. Back then
there would be some kind of increase in fuel prices and everybody would kind of panic. Sometimes people would start working on plans to get more revenue to recognize the increase in fuel costs, but by the time they were ready to implement it, the price would go down. The price of fuel is still an issue today. The
difference today is that I don’t see it going down. We’re not seeing the fluctuations now that we used to see, and I think the price of fuel is always going to be an issue in the industry. I’m not very confident that there are forces at work that are going to make it easy for that price to go down again. The forces are headed in another direction.
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