Historic Year for Minnesota School Bus Contractor Punctuated by NSTA Award

Marksohn, Vaughn, Pape & Loshbaugh also honored for contributions to industry

July 31, 2024

From left: NSTA Executive Director Curt Macysyn, Palmer Bus Services COO Shane Johnson, and STN President and Publisher Tony Corpin at the NSTA Annual Meeting and Convention on July 23, 2024 in Nashville, Tennessee.

Palmer Bus Service punctuated its 50th anniversary this year with the Contractor of the Year Award from the National School Transportation Association.

The company based in Mankato, Minnesota, was honored during last week’s NSTA Annual Meeting and Convention held in Nashville, Tennessee. Palmer Bus is pilot testing the “CowFart Bus” by Ingevity that converts a diesel school bus to run on a blend of renewable natural gas and diesel.

School Transportation News is in its second year sponsoring the award.

Palmer Bus COO Shane Johnson and CFO Chris Champlin were at NSTA to accept the award. Last fall, Johnson told the Mankato Free Press that the two CowFart buses had resulted in 30 percent less diesel consumption. The pilot test reportedly runs through this September.

Jenna Fromm, CEO of Palmer Bus, said she was “honored and humbled” upon receiving news of the NSTA Contractor of the Year Award.

“Here’s to continuing our mission of serving our communities by safely transporting students!” she wrote in a Linkedin post.

A filmed video posted to the Palmer Bus Services YouTube channel describes the company’s core values of safety, integrity in doing business, dignity for employees, helping each other, and community. Fromm noted that the ultimate goal is to make Palmer Bus a great place to work.

Her father and mother, Floyd and Lois Palmer, started the company in 1974 with eight school buses. Fromm and sister Hollie Johnson took ownership of the company in 2012, with Fromm becoming CEO three years later. Palmer Bus now operates transportation service for over two dozen school districts across Minnesota.

Palmer Bus also was won an NSTA Golden Merit Award in 2001 for “excellence of service, safety and outstanding demonstration of community responsibility.” The company was a Top Transportation Teams honorable mention winner at STN EXPO Reno.

Meanwhile, NSTA also inducted Bart Marksohn and Patrick Vaughn into the association’s Hall of Fame. Marksohn is a member of a family school bus business that originated in 1957, when parents Walter and Edith took on subcontracted student transportation services on Long Island, N.Y. Within two years, the couple started WE Transport. The company, now owned by Beacon Mobility, transports over 50,000 students a day via 1,700 school buses for over 60 school districts. Marksohn is executive vice president of WE Transport while brother Jerry serves as chief information officer.

Vaughn recently retired as CEO of Student Transportation of America, one of the largest school bus contractors in the U.S., and stepped down from the NSTA board after five years. He previously served as company president and COO from 2011-2019. Vaughn got his start in student transportation with Laidlaw Transit as senior vice president of operations in 1991. He was named COO of First Student after Laidlaw was acquired in 2007.

STA also won a Go Yellow, Go Green Award for promoting a greater use of school buses as a way of limiting pollution and excessive fuel usage on the nation’s road. Cook-Illinois Corporation in Chicago won its second Go Yellow, Go Green award, the only company to do so to date.

Other NSTA awards given last week included a Distinguished Service Award for Bob Pape, the former NSTA finance chair and co-founder of the National Association for Pupil Transportation who retired last year from Dell Transportation, and a special NSTA Champions Award to Bill Loshbough, a former state director for pupil transportation at the New Mexico Department of Education as well as NAPT Hall of Fame member and longtime NAPT director of meetings and conventions.

Pape received the NSTA Distinguished Service Award in 2018 and was president of the New York School Bus Contractors Association in 2014 and 2015. He worked in student transportation for 47 years.

NSTA has a U.S. flag fly over the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C, in honor of Loshbough, who was a two-time chair of the National Congress on School Transportation (NCST) and served as the National Safety Council’s representative on the NCST’s Interim Steering Committee for more than 25 years. He was also a regional sales manager for seating and foam company HSM Transportation and before that CE White. He owns ExecuWest Consultants in Albuquerque, New Mexico.