On June 2, a school bus carrying about a dozen children from Higher Ground Academy left Snelling Avenue, ran more than a hundred feet across the Hamline University lawn, and hit the stone wall on the north side of the Robbins Science Center. Three students and the driver went to the hospital. Bystander video captured a man telling St. Paul police the brakes had gone out. The company’s attorney told reporters it was operator error: a driver in her first week who hit the gas instead of the brake.

The Minnesota Secretary of State administratively terminated Pride Transportation Bus Services LLC on January 20, 2026. It was not reinstated until August 18. The crash sits in the middle of that window, and so does the rest of the spring semester.

This is not the first time. The company was terminated in February 2024 and reinstated that April. Through every one of those cycles, FMCSA carried the carrier as active.

The name painted on that bus belongs to a different company

Every outlet noted the bus said PTB Services and treated it as shorthand for Pride Transportation Bus Services. It is also the exact legal name of a separate Minnesota limited liability company.

PTB Services LLC was organized February 28, 2020, by Guled Mubarak Ali at 45 Ivy Ave W in St. Paul, the yard Pride operates from. It holds USDOT 3401905, registered federally as Ride Bus Service, added the same day the LLC was formed, with the same officer on both records. Five power units, zero declared drivers, and an MCS-150 filed the day it registered and never updated since. It carries its own termination history: February 2022 to March 2023 (thirteen and a half months), then again in January 2025.

Which entity operated the bus that hit the wall is not a rhetorical question. It is the first thing a records request to Higher Ground Academy would answer, and no one has asked it. When the company’s attorney told CBS Minnesota that the published inspection statistics “do not represent the entirety of our operating fleet,” that is the first place I would go to find out what he meant.

The state says out loud that it cannot act

Minnesota State Patrol records reviewed by KSTP 5 Investigates show Pride failed 62 of 68 bus inspections during a ten-month stretch in 2023. Between January and April of this year, six of seven failed. Across its history, the company has failed roughly 60 percent of state inspections, compared with a statewide school bus average of 10 percent. More than 20 buses were pulled from service in 2023 alone for serious brake defects.

Carriers get 30 days’ notice before a scheduled inspection.

Lt. Brian Reu of the State Patrol laid out the enforcement architecture for KSTP without being asked to defend it. Commercial bus companies fall under the Minnesota Department of Transportation, which can shut a carrier down. The State Patrol, which does the inspecting, has no such authority. “We are limited to what we can do statutorily,” he said. The company can keep operating as long as it submits signed documentation certifying the problems are fixed.

The agency with the eyes cannot act. The agency that can act does not inspect. The remedy is a signature from the company saying it took care of it.

Pride does have a federal file. USDOT 2907401, 31 inspections, 319 violations, 135 out-of-service findings, 15 crashes. The file isn’t empty. The federal record holds 31 roadside inspections across ten years. The State Patrol ran 68 periodic inspections on this fleet in ten months of 2023. A periodic bus inspection is not a federal roadside inspection and does not flow to MCMIS, so the brake failures and the jammed emergency exits all live on the state side. FMCSA’s own 2021 safety rating on Pride was computed on two inspections from the preceding 24 months.

The one federal hook that reaches a school bus driver

FMCSA has no authority over Pride. But the driver in that seat needed a school bus endorsement on her Minnesota CDL, and since February 7, 2022, every applicant adding a passenger, school bus, or hazmat endorsement has had to complete entry-level driver training through a provider listed on FMCSA’s Training Provider Registry. The carrier is nearly invisible to the federal government. The credential the carrier hires against is not.

Eleven weeks before this school year started, the federal government pulled hard on that thread. On August 31, FMCSA executed emergency removal of more than 110 training providers from the registry, effective immediately, after cross-referencing roadside inspections of drivers cited for failing English Language Proficiency requirements. A July sweep of nearly 400 providers across 40 states produced more than 160 notices of proposed removal, with investigators finding ranges too small for required maneuvers, instructors without the license class they were teaching toward, and facilities keeping no assessment records. One provider told investigators its classroom was inside a school bus parked in the back of a trailer. FMCSA says drivers certified by providers in that sweep are linked to 239 commercial vehicle fatalities. Homeland Security Investigations served notices of inspection at more than 200 driving schools across 23 states the same morning.

The driver was in her first week. If she obtained her school bus endorsement after February 2022, a provider on the registry certified her, and that provider’s name sits in the Minnesota Driver and Vehicle Services record attached to her CDL transaction. Nobody has asked.

The school did not have to take bids

A company that failed 62 of 68 state inspections kept getting work for a reason, and the failures were not secret. Nothing in Minnesota law required anyone to shop.

Higher Ground Academy is a charter school, and charter schools in Minnesota are exempt from the competitive bidding requirements that bind districts, cities, and counties. Sahan Journal’s Becky Dernbach and Cynthia Tu found charter schools awarding more than $132 million a year in outside contracts above $100,000, with transportation among the largest categories. Volunteer boards approve them and turn over constantly. Authorizers told Sahan that assessing contracts falls outside their scope.

No procurement officer. No requirement to compare vendors. No agency reviews a bus company’s inspection record before a charter signs with it, because no step in the process assigns anyone to look.

Pride contracts with at least five schools.

One MC docket, two carriers, one insurance policy

MN H Express LLC, USDOT 2353220, MC 805791, lists Muhamed Ali as officer, the same name FMCSA carries for Pride. Its authority has been involuntarily revoked twice, in December 2016 and again in July 2022. It is active today, running vehicle out-of-service at 22.2 percent and driver out-of-service at 17.6 percent.

Ohan Transportation LLC holds USDOT 3401671 in St. Paul with zero power units, zero drivers, and no inspection history. It also carries MC number 805791, which is MN H Express’s docket, and an insurance filing reading Great West Casualty, policy GRT07940A, effective September 2, 2023, the identical insurer, policy number, effective date, and limit on MN H Express’s filing. Ohan’s DOT number was issued February 27, 2020. PTB Services LLC’s was issued on February 28. Take that for what you will.

The driver still has to open the door

None of this relieves the person in the seat, and I have run these fleets.

A driver who sees an out-of-service sticker and drives anyway has violated 49 CFR 396.9(d)(2). Section 396.13 requires the driver to be satisfied that the vehicle is in safe operating condition before moving it. The last person who decides whether a commercial vehicle goes on the highway is the person holding the wheel. Not the dispatcher, not the owner, not the shop.

Drivers usually don’t exercise that authority because nobody told them it was theirs, and the ones who tried got fired. Which is why the sentence that belongs in every one of these stories is 49 U.S.C. 31105. A driver who refuses to operate a vehicle he reasonably believes is unsafe is federally protected, and the complaint goes to OSHA within 180 days.

A driver in her first week at a company whose training files the State Patrol found incomplete, certified by a provider nobody has identified, was never going to know that. Two people failed on Snelling Avenue in June. Only one of them had a federal remedy available and no idea it existed.