First Student
The Firm
First Student runs more than 48,000 vehicles from over 530 locations in the United States and Canada with about 66,800 employees, and it publishes a mergers and acquisitions page naming the person to write to. Its head office is at 191 Rosa Parks Street in Cincinnati.
The interesting fact is the cadence rather than the size. Its own press index, walked year by year, carries six named acquisitions between October 2022 and July 2023 and then nothing: no acquisition announcement in 2024, 2025 or 2026. The companies it did buy are exactly the profile a searcher would look at, family operators running between fifty and one hundred and fifty buses, several of them Canadian.
For a school bus owner that pause is the useful signal. The largest buyer in the trade bought hard for a year and a half and then stopped saying anything, which means an exit today is more likely to be to a regional contractor than to the market leader, and it is worth asking why before assuming the top bidder is still bidding.
What It Buys
Cincinnati, Ohio. The largest school bus contractor in North America, which bought six family bus companies across two countries inside eighteen months and has announced no acquisition since.
Selling to them one day, or watching them as the other bidder? Track them in the Contact Book so the relationship has a next-touch date.
Confirmed Deals
3 deals traced to announcements by First Student, 2022 to 2023, newest first. Firms that announce every deal show a fuller run here than firms that report acquisitions as quarterly counts, so read this as the evidence that clears the bar rather than as the firm's whole record.
Nothing newer has cleared the bar in 41 months, against a registry whose newest confirmed deal is August 6, 2026. A gap past 12 months can mean the firm has slowed, or that it has stopped announcing; treat it as a prompt to check its own newsroom before assuming either.
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