The Blue Bird Corporation (originally known as the Blue Bird Body Company) is an American bus manufacturer. Headquartered in Fort Valley, Georgia, the company was best known for its production of school buses. The company has also manufactured a wide variety of other bus types, including transit buses, motorhomes, and specialty vehicles such as mobile libraries and mobile police command centers.

Since the 1990s, the company has concentrated on the development of alternative-fuel vehicles in the segment. Along with the production of propane, natural gas, and gasoline-fuel buses, Blue Bird has expanded the development of zero-emissions vehicles, introducing electric-powered versions of each of its product lines.

After producing his first bus in 1927 as a side project, A.L. Luce founded Blue Bird Body Company in Fort Valley, Georgia in 1932. Remaining under family control into the early 1990s, Blue Bird changed hands several times in the 2000s, with the company becoming publicly owned in February 2015 (with previous owner Cerberus Capital Management holding a 58% share). The company currently assembles vehicles in its Fort Valley, Georgia facility, its headquarters since 1946. Currently, Blue Bird is the only American full-line school bus manufacturer under American ownership, and concentrates its product lineup on school buses, school pupil activity buses, and specialty vehicle derivatives.

As the second quarter of the 20th century began, Albert Luce Sr. was an entrepreneur who developed some of the earliest purpose-built school buses, transitioned from wagons. What is now Blue Bird Corporation began life as a side project in a Ford Motor Company dealership in Perry, Georgia. Along with the dealership in Perry, Luce owned the Ford franchise in Fort Valley, Georgia, a rural farming community south of Macon.

In 1925, Luce sold a customer a Ford Model T with a wooden bus body; the customer sought to use the bus to transport his workers. Due to a combination of unsatisfactory construction quality of the bus body and the rough conditions of the rural Georgia roads, the wooden bus body started to disintegrate before the customer had finished paying for the vehicle. Driven to produce an improved design to sell to his customers, Luce sought input to develop a stronger bus body capable of surviving unimproved roads. In place of wood, Luce constructed his bus body from steel and sheet metal; wood was used as a secondary material. Completed in 1927, the bus was put into use as a school bus.

While buses would initially remain a side project for Luce (with only nine bus bodies produced between 1929 and 1931), the onset of the Great Depression would change his company forever. Following a 95% decline in car sales in 1931, Luce sold both of his Ford dealerships, using the $12,000 proceeds from the sale to begin his own company, concentrating solely on bus production. Inspired to begin production in order to support the local economy, Luce also felt school buses would be a necessary resource as part of the shift towards consolidated schools.

The early use of farm wagons on a part-time basis soon evolved into purpose-built school bus products, each with economy and function as major priorities. In 1937, the company began production of full-steel bus bodies, an innovation which soon replaced the wooden bodies which were then in common use around the United States.

In a 1939 industry conference, Blue Bird engineers contributed to the selection of school bus yellow, still in use today.