Hard work pays big dividends for Oklahoma’s McLerran, recipient of the inaugural Peter J. Grandolfo Memorial Leadership Award

Randall Jack McLerran is a man’s man, one used to working the soil with his hands. And being the good Oklahoma native he is, he knows his way around a corral, as he admits he’s ridden a horse or two in his nearly 60 years walking God’s green Earth.

Above all, Mcerran is a school bus man, a lifelong educator serving as the Oklahoma state director since 1991. He’s been there through the thick and thin as a steering committee member for 2005 National Congress on School Transportation and the NAPT and NASDPTS boards of directors. There’s nothing he enjoys more than getting in a room with bus drivers, whether it be for training or conversation.

But it was on the family farm in Cordell, about 100 miles east of his current home in Oklahoma City, and at a tender age that this distinguished, soft-spoken man more commonly known in school bus circles as Randy learned the value of hard work and leadership.

For the differences he has made since for school bus operations in Oklahoma and nationwide, McLerran received the inaugural Peter J. Grandolfo Memorial Leadership Award on July 30 at the 14th Annual School Transportation News EXPO.

“This industry and this career have given me so much more than I’ve given it,” McLerran said humbly on July 30, following the receipt of the award co-sponsored by STN and Sure-Lok. “It’s given me colleagues as well as friends. I have nothing but the utmost admiration for Peter.”

Before Grandolfo, the former transportation director for Chicago Public Schools and an international advocate of students with special needs, passed away unexpectedly in January 2006 at the age of 59, he and McLerran often spoke of their dream to one day own a buffalo farm in celebration of Oklahoma’s place in Americana. The two met in the early 1990s at one of the very first conferences for Transporting Students with Disabilities & Preschoolers. McLerran was just starting to exert himself on the national stage as Oklahoma’s new pupil transportation director.

But long before, as early as first grade, McLerran was already pulling his weight by pulling cotton on his family’s group of farms in Southwest Oklahoma, parcels that ranged from 80 to 160 acres each. He would milk the cows, gather eggs from the henhouse and accomplish various other chores each morning before getting ready for school.

How this gentleman forged a career spanning more than three decades in education and onto pupil transportation had much to do with this upbringing.

“A lot of it had to do with the hoe handle,” he said.

The Value of Hard Work
Raising cotton in the 1950s was as labor-intensive work as one could find. Herbicides didn’t exist back then to help farmers keep the weeds out of their potentially lucrative fields. The McLerran family farms totaled 750 acres, 500 of which grew the cash crop, so McLerran and his older brother Gary had their work cut out for themselves.

“Starting about the first of June, you got a sharp hoe, a water can and you went to the field,” he recalled. “I think for a lot of people in southwest Oklahoma, well I’m not so sure the Great Depression ended with World War II, The 1950s were pretty tough. A lot of long, hard hours.”

Despite his work ethic, McLerran also toiled with his mind, filling the day’s remaining hours addressing his studies. History was and is an especially favorite topic of his. Family history had just as profound of an effect on him as did life on the farm. Neither his father, who fought with the U.S. Army in Germany during World War II, nor his mother finished high school. Still, they made known their own dreams for their children.

“Not going to college was really not an option,” said McLerran, who was born amongst a nation of Baby Boomers in 1949. “It was just all I heard all my life. I think that’s so true of that generation.”

By his early teens, he was driving a John Deere tractor, which ultimately steered him toward a career in school transportation.

“I credit that background a lot in the fact that Dad would give you several tasks: ‘Go plow this place, and then take the tractor to the next place. Change implements,” he recalled. “He didn’t go around to see if you were actually doing it. Now I’m talking 12 to 14 years of age when I started. You learn to be self reliant, if you start a job to finish it, and to improvise. If you broke down, you made whatever repairs to get through the end of the day.”

For Randy and other rural kids like him at the time, the tractor was akin to a bicycle, albeit much larger and cumbersome. Those early models knew nothing of today’s satellite GPS or four-wheel drive. It was a tool, plain and simple, to get their chores done and their bodies from here to fro. Sometimes that even entailed school. But most often, the trusty yellow school bus did the job, driven by the local high school talent.

“Gosh, they were just your heroes,” said Randy.

It was common for senior boys several miles to the west in Dill City to formally apply for the job. They had to pass their driving test, of course, but then they’d also have to appear before the city council and explain why they should be allowed to drive routes, never exceeding 35 mph.

“‘If you guys mess up, I have all these parents watching you,” Randy recalled being told by the school principal when his turn came. “Of course, the farmers were out early in the morning, and at that time most of the mothers were at home. It was a great experience at that age to accept that responsibility and to perform the function.”

Needless to say, accidents were extremely rare.

The Boy Becomes a Man
McLerran went on to college, graduating from Southwestern Oklahoma State University in 1972 with a bachelor’s in education. By the end of the decade, the industrious McLerran had been a high school social science teacher, special education teacher and elementary principal in both Oklahoma and Texas. He was also a substitute bus driver with a masters degree in special education from East Central Oklahoma State University and numerous other vocational certificates.

“The first year I was hired to teach, there was a route opening,” he recalled McLerran. “It was only a half-day job, but they needed a driver so bad, they found things for me to teach so I could drive their bus around. I was 22.”

By summer of 1979, the state Department of Education hired him as a reading specialist. The pupil transportation department at the time had five field employees, two administrators and the state director, and the following year a position was opening up. One of his first assignments was to perform in-service training for a group of elementary teachers, some of whom had been on the job for 30 years.

“You talk about walking into a room of hostile people,” McLerran joked.

The experience not only helped him learn how to work with adult educators, and more importantly to transition trainees from a defensive posture into one where they’re ready and willing to learn, but it also evolved McLerran into the training instructor he is today, a skill that has drawn rave reviews over the past decade and a half from school bus drivers all across the nation who have attended his presentations.

Taking the Reins
He attributes that experience as well as his upbringing to his management style: he mentors but doesn’t micro manage.

“I think if I have one talent, it’s being able to recognize good talent,” he said.

He’s also quick to give credit to others, like Oklahoma Superintendent of Education Sandy Garrett for giving pupil transportation the attention it deserves, and for her out-of-the-box thinking, a trait McLerran himself fosters in his staff and throughout the state.

And he’s also done quite a job of it the past 16 years, cultivating the state’s fleet of nearly 7,500 buses and serving as a general role model industry-wide. The state is as diverse as they come, ranging from more urban districts around such areas as Oklahoma City to sparse counties that total 900 square miles. He’s seen and done a lot, like rewriting the state school bus driver manual during the 1980-1981 school year after discovering it was written at a post-graduate reading level when most drivers at the time were only reading at the eighth grade.

“He’s always giving you confidence, and he’s always pushing you to do things,” commented Chuck Lawson, the president of the Oklahoma Association for Pupil Transportation. “He knows the business inside and out, but when it’s time to talk about other things he’s real fun to be with.”

Yes, fun, when you’re not the school bus clock.

Kim Hamilton, a former OAPT president, first met McLerran at Edmond Public Schools in 1987.

“He was my teacher for the state certification at that time,” she fondly remembered. “He was so serious about everything, he even locked the doors at 6 p.m. and didn’t let us out until 10 each night. He meant business when it came to school buses.”

He still does. To know McLerran is to also realize that, while he appreciates history, he is a forward thinker. And he’ll speak his mind. At the 1995 STN EXPO, he sat on a panel that discussed the school bus of the future. They pretty much hit the mark on such innovations as the evolution of GPS.

“I think technology will continue to make our job easier, more efficient and hopefully will move us into a more accepted realm of educational providers,” he said.

But, in the same breath, McLerran frets that the industry has not used technology to do enough about onboard learning.

“We all know we need to extend the school day,” he said. “If we can turn that ride time into educational time, we can kill two birds with one stone, improve student performance and hopefully at the same time cut down on student behavior problems.”

McLarren can be outspoken, one of the comments an industry professional made in his winning nomination for the Grandolfo Award. One of the issues he’s adamantly against is school vouchers.

“I think it’s a tax break for people who don’t need one. Private schools are actively already recruiting are best public school kids. I have a distrust for it,” he commented.

And he worries about transportation funding and the rising cost of equipment.

“No one likes to pay taxes. We may have to restructure at some point how we fund ourselves,” citing that the historical revenue from property taxes no longer seems to be enough. “Sometimes I worry we’re a little bit under assault.”

But McLerran continues to man the front lines.

How many of us, him included, who remain entrenched in the industry in another 30 years remains a mystery. But you can bet, somewhere, Randy McLerran will be working as hard as ever at something very worth while, and making a difference for it.

Reprinted from the September 2007 issue of School Transportation News magazine. All rights reserved.