More than two months after First Student Inc. took over student transportation for the Philomath School District, the company’s buses are running, its new operations base on South Ninth Street has its signage up and district officials say the transition has gone about as smoothly as they could have hoped.
The switch ended the district’s 15-year relationship with Mid Columbia Bus Co. and brought back a company that had actually served Philomath decades earlier before Mid Columbia won the contract in 2010. The Philomath School Board approved First Student’s five-year contract in May after selecting the company’s proposal in April, following a request-for-proposals process that scored First Student well ahead of Mid Columbia, largely on the strength of its safety programs, newer fleet and a technology package called HALO.
With students now a few weeks into the new routine, First Student’s area general manager overseeing the Philomath contract, Donna Sansoterra, along with Superintendent Susan Halliday and Business Manager Jennifer Griffith, spoke about how things are going — and about introducing the company to a community that will be seeing its buses on the road, at ballgames and outside its schools for years to come.
A national company, a local footprint
First Student describes itself as the largest school bus provider in the country with roughly 45,000 to 50,000 buses and more than 500 locations across the United States and Canada, including about 1,400 locations in Oregon alone. As area general manager, Sansoterra oversees about 20 locations and roughly 30 districts across the region — meaning Philomath is one piece of a larger territory she manages from outside the community.
Locally, the operation is run day-to-day by location manager Caren Gates and dispatcher Rose Nesbit, both of whom came over from Mid Columbia. The district’s routes — 13 of them, run by 16 drivers — were rebuilt using First Student’s in-house routing team rather than the manual system the previous vendor relied on.
“The first few weeks of school you’re tweaking,” Sansoterra said. “It looks good on paper, but in reality we need to make some adjustments.”
Halliday agreed that most of the changes so far have centered on timing, as the company worked out real-world running times once buses were actually on the roads.
“There have been some people that have expressed some concern about the changes in stops,” Halliday said. “But some of the changes … have been predicated on safety, appropriate timing, and not stopping at everyone’s house because they can’t. But for the most part, people are feeling good.”
First Student’s new operations base sits on South Ninth Street — that location decided upon after scouting other options, including off Clemens Mill Road and the former Mid Columbia property.
The Mid Columbia property, she said, was too small and sat immediately next to a railroad crossing — a significant complication for buses, which are required to stop at every crossing both entering and leaving a lot. Other properties under consideration were shared-use sites, which Sansoterra said posed security concerns and coordination headaches.
The South Ninth Street property won out for its layout.
“Oh my gosh, this is the one,” Sansoterra recalled thinking. “It’s a straight square. Whereas all the other properties we looked at, parking buses — 40-foot school buses — can be a challenge.”
The site includes a pull-through shop and room for both buses and staff vehicles with space to grow. E.D. Hughes Excavating operated out of the property for several years.
A newer fleet at Philomath in operation
Of the buses now on Philomath routes, the newest fleet, according to Sansoterra, includes 2024 and 2026 models. The district has 18 buses in service, including several “trip buses” — Type D vehicles with underbody storage for sports equipment — though some of those specialty buses are delayed because of nationwide manufacturer backlogs.
“Bus manufacturers are really struggling to keep up with demand right now,” Sansoterra said.
Both Halliday and Sansoterra pointed to the newer fleet as one advantage should breakdowns occur during away games, a persistent headache for Philomath athletic teams in recent years, with buses sidelining stranded players and coaches for hours after contests.
Sansoterra noted that First Student’s larger network gives it an edge in those situations. If a bus fails on the road, a nearby First Student location — rather than one dispatched all the way from Philomath — can often send help.
“If we get a location that’s nearby that can resolve the issue and get those kiddos picked up, then that’s what we’re going to do,” she said, while acknowledging newer vehicles aren’t immune to early mechanical issues. “You’re working out the bugs, just like whenever you buy something new.”
Sansoterra said a “good number” of Mid Columbia’s drivers transferred to First Student, supplemented by new hires from nearby communities, including some coming from a Corvallis-area contract for Oregon State University’s Beaver Bus service that is ending, as well as drivers from Toledo and Jefferson. The company also conducted a wage analysis to stay competitive with the local market.
HALO and the road to real-time tracking
Much of the RFP’s emphasis on First Student centered on HALO, the company’s technology platform combining AI-assisted cameras, predictive maintenance data and driver coaching tools. Sansoterra described HALO as an umbrella system built in partnership with a fleet-telematics provider, incorporating both driver-facing and forward-facing cameras that can flag issues like unbuckled seatbelts, rolling stops, driver fatigue or phone use. The system is being installed fleet-wide across the company’s roughly 280 locations, including Philomath.
The system also includes a “kudos” feature that lets the company recognize drivers for strong performance, alongside the coaching and accountability piece.
“It just kind of keeps everybody in sync,” Sansoterra said. “No complacency allowed.”
Halliday said the camera integration is still coming together on the district’s end — footage isn’t yet streaming in real time, but the company pulls and shares video when the district requests it.
“They’re working on the camera integration,” Halliday said. “So if we need video, they are pulling it off and sending it to us. It’s not quite yet real time, but we’re getting there.”
The more visible piece for families will be First View, a parent-facing app that tracks buses similar to a rideshare app. Both Sansoterra and Halliday described it in similar terms — parents will be able to see where a bus is relative to their stop and set custom alerts. Griffith said families will be able to choose a notification radius of, for example, a half-mile or a mile before the bus arrives.
“Or if somebody sees that we haven’t had breakfast yet, but the bus is on the way, or the bus is running a little late,” Halliday said of the app’s potential use.
The company typically waits to roll out the app until routes have stabilized, since accuracy depends on route data being finalized. As of this week, it was being piloted with a small group of families, with Halliday hoping for a wider release within a week or two. Both officials cautioned that accuracy can depend on connectivity and can be less precise in areas with several closely spaced stops.
Maintenance and driver accountability
First Student’s Philomath operation includes a dedicated technician who transferred from another company location, backed by regional and area maintenance managers. The company tracks preventive maintenance compliance, GPS health and parts inventory, and ranks its shops on an internal tier system — bronze, silver and the top tier, known internally as a “gold wrench.” Technicians can also earn incremental wage increases by completing ASE mechanic certifications.
For student behavior on buses, First Student uses an internal training program called First Serves, which Sansoterra described as behavior-focused rather than centered on labeling individual students. Drivers can log incidents through a companion system, First Acts, using a tablet that routes the report directly to a school’s designated administrator, allowing the district and company to track patterns by student or school over time.
One development that emerged from Halliday and Griffith — the district is transporting more students within Philomath’s town limits than expected — more, in fact, than Oregon’s transportation statute technically requires the district to provide. It’s a longstanding practice, Halliday said, not a change introduced by First Student, but one the district is now reexamining now that it has better data.
“For years we’ve transported inside that boundary,” Halliday said. “We’re just taking a look at where are we transporting from, and where are we picking up at.”
Halliday noted that the switch has also given the district new visibility into its own transportation patterns, since bus routing is now integrated with the district’s student information system — allowing staff to see exactly which students are riding which bus, and where.
“It’s really just a year to kind of watch and see what kinds of changes might we want to make into the next year,” Halliday said, noting that she and other district staff meet weekly with Sansoterra and local First Student staff.
Sansoterra said the company is aiming to prove itself to a community it once served years ago, before other providers held the contract.
“We’ve really worked hard to become the safest, most reliable school bus transportation,” she said, “and we just hope that we walk the walk in their eyes — that we are showing them that we are capable and that we are going to provide the best service and the safest transportation for their students.”
