Gulf Shores High School’s Brandi Owens, Randy Carlisle Earn Statewide Transportation Honors

Two members of the Gulf Shores High School (GSHS) team who help get students to and from class safely each day are being recognized with statewide honors. Brandi Owens, a GSHS math teacher and bus driver, has been named Alabama Bus Driver of the Year, while Randy Carlisle has been named Alabama Transportation Director of the Year. Both honors were presented at a state conference held earlier this summer, where transportation professionals from across Alabama gathered to recognize the people responsible for keeping school bus fleets running safely and on schedule.

The annual awards bring together two sides of a school system’s transportation operation that rarely share the spotlight. Bus drivers of the year are selected from nominees across the state’s districts, with safety records, professionalism and rapport with students weighing heavily in the selection, while transportation director honors recognize the administrative work of routing hundreds of buses, maintaining fleets and managing the drivers who operate them. Winning both in the same year from a single school system is unusual, and Gulf Shores officials have treated the double recognition as a statement about the district’s transportation culture.

A Dual Role in the Classroom and Behind the Wheel

Owens’ recognition is notable in part because of the dual role she plays for Gulf Shores students. In addition to teaching math at GSHS, she also drives a school bus, putting her in a position to know many students both in the classroom and on their daily commute. Teachers who drive routes are a tradition in many Alabama districts, where combining roles helps districts cover driver shortages while giving educators extra income — but the combination also creates a distinctive relationship with students, who see the same face at the start and end of the day that they see in class.

Being named Alabama’s top bus driver reflects the kind of consistency and care that parents and school administrators depend on from the men and women who transport children every school day, often before the first bell rings and after the last one. School bus driving demands a professional license, pre-trip inspections, and the patience to manage a busload of students while navigating traffic — responsibilities that state award programs exist to spotlight. For a math teacher, the morning route is the first class of the day in a different sense: setting students’ frame of mind before they ever reach the building.

Carlisle’s award as Transportation Director of the Year recognizes the broader responsibility of overseeing a school system’s transportation operations, from routing and scheduling to ensuring buses and drivers meet the safety standards required to move students reliably across a district. Transportation directors manage the logistics that most families never see: bus stop placement, route timing against school bell schedules, fleet maintenance cycles, driver certification and training, and the constant reshuffling required when enrollment shifts or weather disrupts the calendar.

Recognition for a Team Effort

School transportation departments are often among the least visible parts of a school system’s daily operation, even though they are essential to it. Drivers and transportation directors are typically among the first school employees a student encounters each morning and among the last they see each afternoon, making punctuality, safety and a steady presence on the route especially important. The school system says it considers itself fortunate to have a transportation team as dedicated as the one led in part by Owens and Carlisle. In a statement following the announcement, the school system said it is “extremely blessed to have such a dedicated team transporting students to and from school each day.”

The statewide honors for Owens and Carlisle come as Gulf Shores City Schools continues to rely on its transportation staff to safely move students throughout the city each day, a responsibility that requires coordination, patience and a strong safety record built over time. Gulf Shores City Schools is one of Alabama’s newer independent districts, having separated from Baldwin County Public Schools to form its own system, and building out standalone operations — including a transportation department — has been part of that transition. The district serves a coastal city whose students span from the beach communities inland, with routes that thread through tourist-season traffic on the same roads summer visitors travel.

Transportation on the Coast

Running a school transportation operation in a Gulf Coast beach city presents challenges that inland districts rarely face. State Highway 59 funnels summer traffic through Gulf Shores toward the beaches, and hurricane season adds evacuation planning to a transportation director’s portfolio, since school buses are often part of municipal and county emergency plans. A department that can deliver students through a summer traffic cycle and stand ready for storm logistics requires the kind of leadership the state award recognizes.

The state conference where the awards were presented gave the Gulf Shores staff a stage among peers who understand the work. Transportation professionals from across Alabama — drivers, mechanics, route coordinators and directors — attend the annual gathering for training sessions on safety regulations, vehicle maintenance and student management, and the awards banquet is the highlight of the week. Winners are chosen through nominations submitted by their districts, with the selection process emphasizing documented safety records and service to students.

For students and families in Gulf Shores, the honors carry a practical message: the people at the wheel and behind the routing maps are being measured against the entire state, and they are setting the standard. School systems across Baldwin County and the rest of Alabama compete for drivers in a tight labor market where commercial license requirements and split-shift schedules make recruitment difficult, and recognition programs like the state awards are one way districts show current and prospective drivers that the work is valued. Gulf Shores’ double win — a teacher-driver and a transportation director honored in the same summer — gives the district’s recruitment story a concrete anchor, and it gives the students on Owens’ route a claim to the best-driven bus in Alabama.

The recognition also reflects the daily arithmetic of a school transportation operation that most families never think about. Every route must be planned so that a single bus covers multiple runs — an elementary loop, then a high school loop — with arrival times synchronized to school bells, and a change in one school’s schedule ripples through every route in the system. Directors like Carlisle spend the year balancing those constraints against driver availability, vehicle maintenance windows and the traffic realities of a coastal city whose roads double in congestion during tourist season.

Safety standards frame all of it. Alabama requires school bus drivers to hold a commercial driver’s license with passenger and school bus endorsements, complete state training, and pass regular physical examinations and background checks. Buses themselves follow state inspection schedules, and drivers perform documented pre-trip inspections before every route. The state’s school bus fleet is one of the largest single fleets in the state government’s orbit, and its safety record over the decades has depended on exactly the professionalism that awards like Bus Driver of the Year are designed to celebrate.

Owens’ dual role deserves particular attention in that context. A teacher who drives a route brings classroom knowledge to the bus and bus knowledge to the classroom: she knows which students had a rough morning, which ones need a moment of encouragement on the ride home, and how the day’s schedule actually unfolds between the bus stop and the bell. Districts that struggle with driver shortages have increasingly looked to staff who can serve in both roles, and Owens’ award demonstrates that the model can produce, rather than merely tolerate, the state’s best.

The honors come at a moment when school transportation is drawing more attention statewide. Driver shortages have prompted districts across Alabama to adjust routes, consolidate stops and, in some cases, ask families to change drop-off patterns, making the recruitment and retention of drivers a priority for administrators everywhere. Against that backdrop, a district that can claim both the state’s top bus driver and its top transportation director in a single year offers a case study in what makes people stay: a culture that treats transportation as essential, leadership that invests in its people, and recognition that reaches from the state conference podium back to the bus loop in Gulf Shores.

For the GSHS community, the summer’s announcements will likely be celebrated when students return, and the district’s statement — “extremely blessed to have such a dedicated team transporting students to and from school each day” — captures the sentiment behind both awards. The students who ride Brandi Owens’ bus to math class each morning arrive knowing their driver is the state’s best; the families whose children reach school safely every day are the beneficiaries of the routing, maintenance and management that earned Carlisle his honor. Together, the two awards describe a complete operation, from the driver’s seat to the director’s office, and they put Gulf Shores City Schools on the map for the profession that makes every school day possible.