In Louisville, “Students were stuck on buses until nearly 10 p.m.” Wednesday “after the school district chose to fund the superintendent’s [pay] raise rather than solve a transportation crisis,” notes Caleb Brown of the Cato Institute. The crisis resulted because the school system used costly, defective software to set bus routes that had already failed when used by another school system.
“Students who were stuck on buses for 6+ hours soiled themselves, over 80 bus drivers quit, and the entire city of Louisville may not go back to school until *October*”, observes Jason Bedrick of the Heritage Foundation. The School Superintendent, Marty “Pollio was unavailable” on August 10 as the crisis unfolded “because he was taking his daughter to college. He’s still the head of Kentucky’s largest district,” Brown notes. Sports journalist Nate Bryan said in disbelief, “the very next day after one of the biggest effups a public superintendent in this state has had, Mr. $75,000 raise takes a personal day instead of doing his job? Good Lord.”
The mess still isn’t fixed. So the schools will remain closed on Monday and Tuesday, and probably all of next week, if not longer.
The Daily Signal reports:
After a long first day of school Wednesday, hundreds of students in Louisville, Kentucky, were stuck on school buses until almost 10 p.m. The school system announced a complete closure of schools Thursday, including canceling all extracurricular activities on the second day of school, because of what it called “transportation issues.”
Parents are outraged over Jefferson County Public Schools’ mishandled transportation nightmare—particularly in light of budget changes by the Board of Education that included a July raise of almost $75,000 for Schools Superintendent Martin Pollio, bumping his annual salary to $350,244….The system doesn’t have enough school bus drivers, who received a 5% raise last year…. As superintendent, Pollio got a 21.4% raise.
Beanie Geoghegan, a Louisville mother, teacher, and education activist, sent this written statement to The Daily Signal:
“…There were children who did not get home from school until almost 10 o’clock last night. There were very young children dropped off at bus stops with no adult present very late in the evening. There were scared, tired, and probably hungry children who peed their pants while waiting to get home after the first day of school. The people in charge knew months ago they would be transporting nearly 100,000 students all over the city yesterday. Rather than focus on that, they chose to spend their summer coming up with ways to skirt around a law that would protect children and parental rights.…”
Parents and staff are livid over the lack of foresight to fix school bus routes after an entire summer of planning.
At the end of the 2022-23 school year, school district officials agreed that bus routes must be rewritten to prevent delays amid a “driver shortage.”
Pollio released a “new plan” July 24 that he said would provide “more drivers than routes to essentially end the bus driver shortage.” This plan included a….computer model that reorganized bus routes….Several drivers had routes that almost tripled in length…Nevertheless, Jefferson County Public Schools proceeded with the proposed computer model and went forward with the bus route plan on opening day Wednesday.
Pollio promised during a press conference two weeks ago that students wouldn’t have to wait for a school bus for “more than an hour, if that.”
The plan didn’t work.
Students were stuck on buses until 9:58 Wednesday night as the vehicles snaked through Louisville, dropping off students in a convoluted, confusing traffic pattern…..New reports indicate that the AlphaRoute software, used by Jefferson County school administrators to recalculate the bus routes, already had been tried by Ohio’s Columbus City Public Schools at a cost of $1.5 million. The Columbus school system stopped using the software last year after it caused increased wait times and other major issues.
Jefferson County Public Schools paid AlphaRoute at least $265,000 to recalculate bus routes for the 2023-24 school year.
