FIRST TAKE A Yellow Bus Who’s Who WRITTEN BY RYAN GRAY |
RYAN@STNONLINE.COM I
t’s always been the people who make this industry so great, so in making the selection for this year’s leadership award, from here on out to be known as our Transportation Director of the Year Award, it felt
appropriate to take a look back at the previous 12 years of winners. A common trait stood out. Duh, you say. Tey are all leaders. True. But leadership, alone, is a trait you can buy for a dime a dozen. Some simply choose to lead in divisive directions driven by malevolent aspirations. (As employee culture expert Don Harkey likes to say, if you don’t think you have bad leaders, take a look at those staff members you consider to be toxic.) Likewise, being a good manager does not a good leader make. Good leadership requires people skills, emotional intelligence and savvy, just as much as it does experts in a given field. It is about making others around you better. Tat is why finding a truly transformational leader is special, as well as difficult to achieve. You can call me a lot of things, and people do, but one thing I tend to be is a good judge of character. A review of our past winners showed me a recurring theme. Each one of our esteemed winners instills a drive in all who come into contact with them to become a better employee, a better person. Te names make up a who’s who list of the school bus world. Te late, great Don Carnahan. Denny Coughlin. Peter Lawrence. Kanoe Cockett. Brian Weisinger. Pete Meslin. Charley Kennington. John Benish, Jr. Kenny Mulder. Charmane White. Shannon Evans. Rick Grisham. Some of these names may be more familiar than others.
If you don’t know who they are, look them up and get to know them. To a tee, they are accomplished experts in student transportation but they are also superb, passionate people who demand the best, not only of their staffs, but most importantly, of themselves. Tey hold themselves to a higher standard that others want to emulate. Nicole Portee of Denver Public Schools is an ideal addition to this list. When visiting with her during the Transportation Director Summit at the STN EXPO Reno in July, I was struck by several insights she made about the state of our industry and the tools professionals
10 School Transportation News • NOVEMBER 2018 need to do their jobs better in the 21st century. I’ve
known her for several years and already was impressed by her knowledge and operational acumen. But, as writer Claudia Newton shares in this edition, Portee is not simply a student transporter, but a child education advocate. It should come as no surprise that she honed her skills at the foot of another great industry leader, Pauline Gervais, a tenured faculty member of the TSD Conference. Get to know Portee starting on page 34, and how her vision helps shape the lives of the 32,000 students Denver transports each day across 155 square miles. She is dynamic. Meanwhile, it would be remiss of me to not use this magazine edition focusing on leadership to also call attention to another pillar of our community. NAPT late last month celebrated the career of a woman who is second-to-none in the industry, and who, finally, is immortalized in the association’s distinguished list of Hall of Fame inductees, individuals who are responsible for shaping this profession into what it is today. Congratulations to Linda Bluth. She is not only a
frequent contributor to School Transportation News and also a TSD Conference tenured faculty member, but also the foremost expert in special needs transportation. While she’s never driven a route, her academic and field experience in special education, training, child behavior and parental outreach, is awe-inspiring. To me, person- ally, she has been and continues to be a trusted advisor, mentor and friend.
I shudder to think what school bus transportation, and special needs rides in particular, would look like across North America without her tutelage to hundreds of thousands of readers, plus state and national conference attendees over the past several decades. Te tremendous school bus safety record should be directly attributed to Bluth’s life work. ●
Ryan Gray, Editor-in-Chief
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