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 carries six named acquisitions between October 2022 and July 2023 and then nothing. That pause was re-checked in August 2026 by walking the whole newsroom sitemap, roughly a hundred and thirty items across three years: electric buses, contracts, hiring weeks, awards, a sponsorship, and no acquisition at all. 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. That 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.
Read again in September 2026 for the years before the row: two Canadian purchases from 2022 and 2023 are context rows, and the Badger row is a signed purchase agreement with no closing post. The newsroom has announced no purchase since July 2023 across more than a hundred items.
What It Buys
Cincinnati, Ohio. The largest school bus contractor in North America, which bought a run of family bus companies across two countries inside a single year, 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
8 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 38 months, against a registry whose newest confirmed deal is September 18, 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.
- Badger Bus Lines · July 18, 2023
A Madison, Wisconsin family operator since 1920, running student, coach, charter and paratransit service from three locations.
- Whitteker Bus Lines · April 3, 2023
An Ontario school and charter bus operator running fifty routes for a local consortium.
- Trans-Ed · March 20, 2023
A New Jersey school and charter bus operator running sixty routes on eighty vehicles.
- Safety Bus · March 1, 2023
Founded in 1960, 106 vehicles and 140 employees serving New Jersey school districts and charter customers.
- Autobus Laval, Inc. · February 22, 2023
A greater Quebec City contractor with 179 vehicles, closed in February 2023; not an American deal.
- Dufresne Group · February 13, 2023
Established in 1955, delivering school bus transportation daily to thousands of students.
- Badder Bus (assets) · October 12, 2022
An Elgin County, Ontario contractor's home-to-school and charter assets; not an American deal.
- Seibarth Transportation · October 3, 2022
A North Bay, Ontario school bus operator running since 1994.