Higher Learning

New York’s Peter Lawrence epitomizes the dedication necessary to enhance one’s career in the service of the nation’s students

By Ryan Gray

Peter Lawrence receives
STN Leadership Award for his dedication to a career in service
of the nation’s students.

Peter Lawrence doesn’t keep things to himself.

Whether it’s the e-mail he shoots off to his peers and associates on cyberbullying, a relatively new phenomenon where children are using social networking Internet sites like MySpace and FaceBook to post disparaging comments and even video about others, or sending the latest information he’s researched on school bus security,

Lawrence is all about making a difference.
By nature, it’s his inquisitiveness that makes the 19-year pupil transportation veteran stand out. Here’s a man who as a rookie school bus mechanic had the audacity to ask his director if he could learn about routing.

“If you want to learn how to route, become a director,” was the terse reply.
“It really took me aback,” Lawrence remembers of the exchange. “Here’s a young kid who volunteered his time and just wants to learn.”

The director was probably just having one of those days. But Lawrence took the “advice” to heart and now finds himself in his fourth year as director of transportation for the Fairport Central School District near Rochester, N.Y.

In charge of 144 employees including five transportation supervisors, which he considers as much family as staff, he is not one to mind his Ps and Qs and sit quietly in the corner to watch the time pass. Lawrence is a go-getter, succinct and to the point. He’s one of those who’s always pushing his own limits and those around him. While speaking with him on the phone, he is apt to politely excuse himself for a moment while he pays mind to an issue one of his mechanics is having at the service bay or to help an employee locate the proper paperwork to fill a transportation request.

There’s a comfortable yet professional air about Lawrence that indicates here’s a man who genuinely cares about his staff just as much as the approximately 6,900 regular education students, and 98 special needs students, plus another 700 private and parochial students who live within 15 miles of their schools. He’s like a comfortable college English professor who has the ability to transcend time, and make it evaporate from the wall clock, with his poignant recitation and translation of literature.

Not bad for a high school drop out.
“Not many people have their GED, their high school diploma and then continue on to get their master’s,” he told me in the lobby of the swank Amway Grand Hotel in Grand Rapids in late October. For such reasons, and many more, School Transportation News had just named Lawrence the second annual STN Leadership Award winner at the NAPT Conference.

Hearing his life story, Lawrence emerges as man who is intelligent but who early on lacked direction. He easily grew bored, and he was a walking dichotomy. He dropped out of high school at 16 only to enroll in the local community college to earn his diploma through an early admissions program. But he wasn’t satisfied with the college life, so he left. He was certainly seeking more to his life than a teen dropout who shuffled back and forth between his mindless job and his parents’ home. So he opted to return to high school and attend summer classes. He excelled to such a point he soon caught up with his classmates, then surpassed their studies and graduated early.

And his academic career is far from over. Having already earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in only four years from Roberts Wesleyan College, this month Lawrence returns to school, this time to become a certified school business official. One day he hopes to become a superintendent. It’s such dedication that the STN Leadership Award strives to recognize. Of all the deserving nominations submitted by the NAPT board, Lawrence immediately stood out for the 18 Professional Development Series courses he had taken, a number that has since grown to two dozen. He also recently taught a lively course at NAPT on media relations that had others in adjoining rooms wondering what the party next door was all about.

“Lecturing just doesn’t cut it,” says Lawrence. Instead, he strives to develop curriculum that is fun and engaging so attendees will want to bring new ideas back home to their drivers.

Lawrence himself is a sponge for anything pupil transportation related. He returned to Rochester from Grand Rapids with some 25 pages of notes from the various workshops he attended.

“The reason I do that is for the retention,” he explains. “Why not share with other people who weren’t as fortunate to attend?”

Share your business card with Lawrence and you will receive periodic e-mail containing links to interesting stories he’s read on school bus management to a video he found on examining evidence from a bus crash. He regularly sends information he gathers to the NAPT board of directors as well as to his associates at the New York Association for Pupil Transportation. To say he is dedicated understates the path he blazes.

He’s not only a member of the Rochester Area Transportation Supervisors Association, RATSA for short, but its past president and an alternate director. Then there’s his affiliation with NYAPT, which last year bestowed upon him its highest honor, the Art Schock Award, given to a member who exhibits exemplary communication skills. Lawrence serves as chair of NYAPT’s Professional Development Committee, is a member of both the special needs and history committees and sat on the board of directors.

It’s in his blood to serve.
Peter Lawrence calls his military service “a priceless experience” that enabled him to develop patience, perseverance and confidence, all innate qualities of a transportation director. Around 1985, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps at the age of 18 and ended up being a “pretty good soldier” in basic camp. He wanted to go on to study avionics but didn’t perform well on the module-based advance training exercises.

“I had to go through a hearing. If they prove you didn’t apply yourself, you became a grunt (soldier),” he remembers.

But Lawrence’s proof is in his pudding. During the hearing, the officers saw something in the young man and assigned him to the “Nasty 90,” a program that required those who failed to advance in their studies to menial yet necessary jobs around the base. Some were assigned to construction teams or became janitors.

“I lucked out and was assigned to the horse stable on base,” he said. “I got to feed the horses, shovel manure. We had buffaloes. That was (actually) a nice experience working with animals.

“These animals weren’t bad,” he went on, laughing. “No, the kids aren’t bad either.”
Whoever said those working in pupil transportation don’t need training has another thing coming.

Lawrence emerged from that Marine Corps experience with options in anything but his original avionics track. He chose ground support equipment and worked in the production control office that assigned some 500 pieces of equipment such as tow tractors, generators, cranes and gas turbine compressors around the base. It soon clicked with him that he was interested in fleet operations.

After a six-month stint as a mechanic with Laidlaw Education Services, he moved on to the Rochester-Genesee Regional Transit Authority, which has become quite the household name of late in the school bus industry for its tripper service violations. Lawrence said he saw nothing of the sort as he worked for Liftline, a para-transit subsidiary of RGRTA, in 1988 before moving on to the Gates Chili School District as a mechanic two years later. It was at Gates that Lawrence also served as a substitute driver.

“I really found a place I liked to work,” he recalled of his six years there.

But with no opportunities for advancement and already being bitten by the desire to himself become a transportation director, Lawrence moved on to the Greece Central School District as a maintenance group leader from 1996 to 1997 before landing at Fairport CSD as a head mechanic. Three years later in 2000 he became the district’s bus driver trainer and safety coordinator. There he finally got his chance to assist in routing, and he leveraged his experience as a school bus technician by monitoring and maintaining all vehicle compliance records regulated by both the New York State Department of Education and Department of Motor Vehicles.

He calls his current school district “The Fairport Family.”

“It’s truly like no other,” Lawrence said. “Our district is the leanest in terms of administrators in the county. There’s not layers and layers. This might be the reason we’re so close. Lots of people wear so many hats.”

None as much as Lawrence, who serves as a member of the district’s Administrative Cabinet and on the Emergency Response Team, Medically Fragile Committee and Health and Safety Committee. He is also is the editor of the district transportation department’s award-winning “Steering Gear” newsletter not to mention his work with RATSA.

“The more you give the more you get,” he likes to say.