In late May, Barry Stock announced he is retiring this month as the executive vice president of business development for National Express Corporation.

The immediate past-president of the National School Transportation Association, in 2002 he oversaw his family business, Stock Transportation, acquired along with Durham School Services by National Express Corporation.

Just a few weeks prior to his announcement, we sat down with Stock to gauge his thoughts on the state of school bus contracting and the challenges facing all school transporters.

On a perceived smaller number school districts converting their fleets to contractor-owned and operated:

I don’t take that view myself. There have been more conversions than ever before. The last five years there have been continuously more conversion opportunities than any proceeding year. We got to take a look at it more globally from a North American perspective. Most contractors are local or regional in their focus of operations. It could be in those particular markets that conversions are down. But at the national level it's to the contrary. The opportunities are up significantly. What I mean to say is not every school district that looks at converting ultimately converts. There are a number of school districts that will decide either because they are able to renegotiation with own labor force or if a union is representing them in order to keep it in-house, or they have chosen at this point and time not to do it. But actual pure numbers of conversion opportunities in our view over past five years has increased significantly year over year over year. The actual conversions are also on the increase. We may not be aware of every single situation looking at converting, only what we’re aware of. One of the biggest challenges we have is in full cost accounting, comparing apples to apples. There are certain school districts that may have a bias towards contracting or staying in house. If you have a bias it’s easy to not count all the costs in an equation. a lot of school districts do allow contractors to make sure they do compare apples to apples. 90% of time we can save a school district significant amounts of money.

On the essential role of transportation to assist in educational equality:

We look at it as almost as a step ladder. Drivers in our vernacular are at the top rung. In school districts, teachers occupy the top rung, and drivers are down the ladder. As far as the educational factor, we see regularly many instances when we can pick a student up, give them a safe, reliable ride to school and they get off the bus with a smile on their face. At least it gives them an opportunity to learn that day. When cuts happen or no transportation is provided, it’s easy for the students to not even attend some days. We feel if you can get students to school in the right frame of mind: A) they are better learners; or B) they are not learning because they're in the wrong frame of mind. We Need to train drivers in student management, train on bullying to stop it quickly, train to recognize if environment on bus is not appropriate. We need to teach them to use skill sets. This helps students to get in that right frame of mind.

On how the industry could best increase ridership:

Some of the challenges we have is we are not good communicators. Yes, the initiative that ASBC is doing, I think, is outstanding, should we come up with the funding we’re looking for. It will educate parents in so many different ways.So many of them still think of school buses like when they rode them, with the hard backed seats. They don’t think about less traffic congestion, the overall safety & security, alternatives. If you take a look at how few fatalities occur in school buses versus those students who drive to school, ride a bike or walk, you’ll see it’s the best mode to get to school. There's the fuel savings, the congestion reduction, a myriad of all the right pieces to be talking to parents about. But we collectively as an industry have not done a good job on educating. We need to educate on the political level, the grass-roots level. The onus is on all of us to do just that. I think you’ll see some initiative out of ASBC, NSTA and NAPT and NASDPTS, as well,as they re-think their strategic plans to help our folks get on the right level of thinking and then use that power to get out to the schools and to hit the parents and the students.

On bullying on board the school bus:

I think there is more that can be done both from an industry perspective and an educational perspective. The reality in the articles that show up is the negative press, but we need to realize that and combat that by being more proactive by showing people what we’re doing. There are only a minority of drivers or routes that have theses challenges. We need to highlight some of the positive things that are happening, But I think there is more training that we as an industry can do. There are many types of student management techniques, and we need more focus on bullying management. We certainly should be doing that and challenging ourselves.You always take a look at what professional education is required out there for our drivers. There's no lack of subject matter, but this is one area where  I think we as an industry can do better. Along with proactive media exposure, we can lick that one.

On the contacting and its possible effects on the economy for school districts:

I think one of the pieces that we’ve been very successful in is going back to the customers, recognizing financial challenges and giving them proactive ideas on how we can help them reduce their costs, such as re-routing and having less buses in systems. We saved school districts tremendous amounts of money using the contracting-out component. Those school districts we have contracted out with have saved significant amounts of dollars, and they’re very appreciative of that. And we are continuing to  with them to change policy or routing scenarios.

On health care in the United States:

The Canadian health care system has been in place for decades, and it has worked very well in order to allow folks to get the health care that they wish. It’s a huge challenge for President Obama and others to get it in place. The challenge that we’re going to have is we need to interpret the rules and get that interpretation correct to fund it to the extent it needs to be funded in order to realize the effectiveness it needs to have. My worry is we’re not certain about how the government is going to definite a full-time position. That will determine the impact on our industry. I worry that assuming that every employee is going to need to have health care funded that the funding may have a detrimental effect, to the extent that, if the cost goes up materially, there will be more school districts that may choose not to put students on the bus because they can’t afford it. So that’s going to put more students walking or riding bikes or finding other methods to get to school. We have seen that in effect raises the risk of either severe injuries or fatalities. Their intended plan of making sure there is good health care for all may in fact put some of the nation’s children at risk.