Hands-on is how Kenny Mulder works and plays, and entirely in all the good ways. Whether it’s riding his Harley Davidson motorcycle, serving at his church, playing hockey, being a devoted husband and father or running school bus operations, he always seems to be smack dab in the middle of things. And, his peers are fond of saying, he’s an all-around good guy.
While soft-spoken, Mulder’s passion shows with everything he does, especially at work. His day job is working as director of transportation for Special School District is Olivette, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. In fact, the program educates a total of 23,000 students at 265 schools in 22 different school districts throughout St. Louis County. Mulder oversees the transportation of about 4,800 students with disabilities and other special needs, and he personally attends more than 300 IEP meetings each school year. “You have to do good in this life to get it back … Kenny does good every day,” commented NAPT Past-President Alexandra Robinson, after learning STN would honor Mulder this month at the association’s Summit held in Kansas City.
As if managing the in-house and contracted services (Durham School Services handles about a third of the routes) for a 510-square-mile service area, 360 schools buses and three facilities isn’t enough, Mulder has also volunteers his time serving on the Missouri Association for Pupil Transportation board of directors, currently representing Region 3, for the past 11 years. He was the state association’s president in 2011 and 2012 as well as the St. Louis region president in 2003 and 2004. He was elected to the NAPT board of directors for Region 4 in 2012.
More recently, Mulder has transitioned into the role of serving as the coordinator of the National Special Needs Team Safety Roadeo, taking the reins from predecessor Cheryl Wolf, herself a former NAPT board member. Mulder is also co-chair of NAPT’s Special Needs Committee and is the Missouri association’s committee chairperson who oversees the St. Louis region and state school bus driver competitions.
“I’m all about making sure the drivers are getting the training they need and helping them out in any way I can,” Mulder told STN. “Because they don’t get a lot, they don’t receive a lot of that additional training. They’re just handed the keys and told to go out.”
Wolf, meanwhile, said Mulder has been instrumental in setting up the TSD Roadeo (owned and operated by STN Media Group in partnership with NAPT) and has worked “tirelessly to make sure it is a success.”
“He is a go-to person for information on transporting students with disabilities,” added Wolf, who is also a TSD Conference tenured faculty member. “Kenny is one of those very unassuming people that just quietly works behind the scenes and makes things happen. TSD owes him a debt of gratitude for his outstanding effort with the Roadeo.”
This kind of dedication is exactly what Robinson, the executive director of transportation for the New York City Department of Education, had in mind when she helped launch NAPT’s leadership program in 2006. She said Mulder’s initiative, integrity, leadership and inspiration of others to follow suit “embodies the LED goals to a tee.”
“When NAPT’s Leading Every Day (LED) initiative first began, I was asked by various board members exactly what we had in mind,” she recalled. “I described different styles of leadership and how we could potentially cultivate that through a formal program, empowering industry professionals to lead from their heart, find their passion, provide mentorship and guidance. On a daily basis, Kenny Mulder does just that. He leads by humble example and provides advice and quiet introspect to all around him.”
Mulder got his school bus start in June 1997 as a shop manager for Laidlaw Transit in St. Louis, overseeing the maintenance budgets and schedules of 280 buses. Mulder had been working for a family-owned trucking company, and when the owners retired and decided to sell, he was recruited by two friends on his hockey team who worked at Laidlaw. Two years later he became Laidlaw’s district maintenance director, and in October 2001, he was named the company’s branch manager.
TransPar Group hired Mulder in April 2004 to serve as maintenance director for its contract with Special School District. He was promoted to the director of transportation role less than two and a half years later, and has been there ever since, though he’s now a district employee after the operations were brought back in-house in July 2010.
Don Bohannon, Special School District’s acting superintendent, said Mulder demonstrates “extraordinary leadership” and is “a true asset.”
“Ken leads a department that safely and effectively transports thousands of students, the majority of whom have special needs, across St. Louis County on a daily basis,” said Bohannon. “He is respected and trusted by staff, parents, students and partner district personnel for always focusing on what is best for kids. When faced with a transportation challenge, Ken’s response is always, ‘How can we make this work?’”
Mulder is all about helping to find solutions. Recently, he found his operation in the middle of the media frenzy surrounding the police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, an area served by Special School District buses.
“We’ve been pretty fortunate, but it’s been pretty scary,” he said. “We have some kids that live right in the heart of the area, right where all the action is taking place. But they don’t seem to mess with the school buses.”
Even at this writing, Ferguson remained a hotbed of community unrest, and Mulder openly worried about what might happen when the grand jury returns with or without an indictment. But in the meantime, the district was keeping staff on the clock longer in the evening until the last school buses had completed their routes and all the children were home. Mulder said he has been relying on feedback from the district’s safety and security personnel situated in Ferguson as well as from local and national newsfeeds.
“The media has really helped us figure out what’s next: There’s supposed to be a riot here, a protest here,” he added. “I think we’ve only had to shut down school for two days. Again, we’ve been pretty fortunate.”
As NAPT Region 4 director, Mulder has also been holding conversations with regional and national transportation leaders to discuss the importance of inter-department and inter-agency communication, collaboration and coordination to plan for and respond to the unforeseen and unimaginable.
“I’ve never dealt with anything like this, and I think most people haven’t,” he said. “You can put all the plans in place you want, but it’s really just keeping that communication open so we know what’s going on where.”
Regarding an especially widespread driver shortage nationwide, Mulder said the challenge for his school district and others is finding qualified drivers who are able to wait a month or longer to pass the required physical exams, background and fingerprint checks and to complete training, all while more and more drivers are retiring.
“We’re a school district that has good wages, and we have benefits for our drivers that are 100 percent paid. I think our issue is we have an aging workforce. In reality, driver hiring for us has not been an issue up until most recently.”
He explained that nine drivers retired this past year from his district, which was an “eye-opener for us.”
“We had to get some training done,” he continued. “We have a very unique hiring process. You’re graded on your application, then you go into a phone interview and you’re graded, so you have multiple steps to go through. The problem a lot of times is that the process, especially with fingerprints and record checks and things like that, takes a little bit longer. Most folks when they are looking for a job need it now, not in three or four weeks from now. That’s probably our biggest challenge.”
The goal, of course, he added, is to put highly qualified, safe drivers behind the wheel who are skilled at accommodating medically fragile students with proper wheelchair securement, safety vests, seat belts and more. And facilitating that kind of training, whether at the local or national level, is what Mulder does best, as his body of work shows.
