School BUSRide spoke with Terry Tippin, executive director of the Student Transportation Association of Indiana. He reflected on his career in student transportation, and offered his thoughts after attending last year’s NAPT ACTS event.
Please tell us about your history in pupil transportation.
Well, I’m actually retired now. I grew up on a dairy farm, and after college I became a teacher, then a principal. From there, I moved into the central office as director of operations, then assistant superintendent, and finally superintendent for a short time before retiring.
During COVID, our state association—the School Transportation Association of Indiana—had to let go of our executive director due to financial challenges. We just weren’t generating any income. After I retired, they asked me to step into that role. It was the right time, because without a dedicated person, no one really had the capacity to do the job correctly. So, I chose to take it on and that’s how I became executive director.
While I was a principal, I earned my doctorate so I could move into the central office. That’s my journey.
During your time in pupil transportation, what were the biggest challenges you observed?
I came from what I thought was a small school. We had 1,500 students, 32 buses, and drove 1,600 miles a day. One of my initial challenges was that I felt too small to engage with the larger districts, so I hesitated to ask questions early on. That was a personal hurdle I had to overcome. Eventually, I realized that whether you have one bus or a thousand, you still need to route it and find someone to drive it. We all have the same problems.
Some challenges that stood out, and I think they’re still true today, include the driver shortage. For us, it didn’t hit until COVID. In our area, we had a lot of retired transportation professionals who wanted part-time work. But once COVID hit, we lost track of those people. Even today, that same district and others across the state list the driver shortage as their number one issue.
We explored different solutions. One was multi-tier busing, which many schools have adopted. But we found it affected not just transportation, but the entire school corporation—you’d have to change start times for schools. There was a lot that went into that decision, and we ultimately decided against multi-tier busing. Instead, we consolidated some of our routes to help with the shortage while remaining single-tier.
Funding has also been a significant issue. Shortly before COVID, Indiana consolidated its funding categories—what used to be five or six different areas became just two: operations funding and education funding. Operations funding turned out to be difficult to maintain. We had to work hard to keep up with bus replacement, and it affected our ability to pay drivers competitively. Another big challenge was maintaining professional development. We almost had to eliminate it entirely. So, the two biggest issues for us were the driver shortage and the lack of funding to support professional development and competitive wages.
What were your takeaways from the NAPT ACTS conference?
As executive director of a state association, I really appreciated NAPT’s openness and their focus on involving state associations. But it’s more than that. Molly McGee-Hewitt didn’t just say they wanted to involve us. She asked, “How can we, as a national group, enhance you as a state organization?”
That kind of mindset was my biggest takeaway—the networking with other state organizations, with the national organization, and observing how NAPT puts together their conference. I brought a lot of that back to help improve our own state conference.
I really appreciate the level of support we’re getting from NAPT. It sounds like maybe it wasn’t always this way, but in the two years I’ve been involved, it has been. More than the speakers—though they were excellent—it was that feeling of connection and support that stuck with me.
That networking has continued beyond the conference. We’ve hosted regional meetings and started collaborating with nearby states like Ohio and Michigan to plan a regional professional development event. It will be a two-day event focused on participants from our three states. The shorter travel distance should make it easier for more people to attend.
How can NAPT better support professionals like you? What about working with state associations like yours?
From my perspective, I don’t know that I could ask for more than what NAPT is already doing. Their efforts to involve us, keep us informed, and maintain consistent communication—through the magazine and the regional updates—have really enhanced what we do. It’s taken us to a new level and significantly improved our professional development offerings.
We have our own statewide certification program for transportation directors. We encourage participants to continue their education and pursue NAPT’s national-level certifications, which have more depth than ours. Our goal is simply to get as much professional development to our members as we can. NAPT’s goal is to dig deep into each topic and help people truly understand them.
So honestly, I don’t have a suggestion for improvement. I really like the direction we’re going.