New school bus route is a 'disaster,' Kentucky superintendent admits. Last kids got home at 10 pm
New school bus route is a 'disaster,' Kentucky superintendent admits. Last kids got home at 10 pm
The Courier Journal reports the disaster came after major changes to school bus routes and school start times this year.
Better cut more funding for K-12! Some of these kids can still tell time!
The US has collapsed, most just aren't willing to admit it to themselves.
JCPS is not suffering for funding. A big part of the issue is they used shitty software to plan a bus route. On top of it being notoriously hard for keeping drivers in the district.
Edit: but shit like this happens and the R’s that control the state are going to start calling for the funding to be slashed, because might as well, its already one of the worst in the state.
JCPS needs a massive overhaul. Something big needs to change.
The drivers aren't vanishing in the night at the hands of shadowy cabal.
It's "notoriously hard for keeping drivers" because the money needed to keep them has been pocketed by administrators or politicians. That's why their wages keep going up but the wages of everyone below them keep going down.
It's a problem with an identifiable cause and known solution, and it needs to be said out loud every time.
"On top of it being notoriously hard for keeping drivers in the district."
If you pay them, they will drive. If you raise them adequately regularly, they will stay.
Just like the national "teacher shortage" because we pay them dogshit relative to their education, tell them they're spoiled and don't even deserve dogshit, and then blame the few still showing up for poor outcomes. Then, when kids recognize that getting into teaching makes you a sucker, we cry tears of blood about classroom sizes as if we can't trace back why.
We should take half the defense budget for 10 years and put it into rebuilding the utter ruin that is public K-12, in order of the states with the worst outcomes, if we want to even compete in the future. We of course won't though. We'll jist keep saying "if only there was something we could dooooooooo..."
Ooh I know, we should cut rich peoples taxes yet again, that'll help this time for sure!
There are hundreds of administrators in this school district making six figures. The main administrator makes 300k+ if we didn't have enough drivers these tax payer funded jerkoffs could've been out driving these buses and getting these kids home safely. JCPS likes to waste money year in and year out and every single year they do something embarrassing. This one was top tier embarrassing.
They REALLY lowballed the funding when some locations have a stop half mile away on top of being slow and inefficient due to lack of drivers and driver training.
Why even pay a firm for optimal route planning if you dont even have the personel to execute it.
So I can't speak to every school district across the country, but I can speak for the one I worked in and there's a (good/bad, you be the judge) reason for that.
In my state the language is explicitly may provide transportation. So that means it's something they take upon themselves. They get money for transportation from the feds/state obviously, but let's all be honest that it's a drop in the bucket to what it should be. And it's not an easy job to coordinate. I don't know the particulars of this system, but the county I worked for had some absolute backwater areas in its district. We're talking thirty minutes up/down mountain roads to the nearest school.
Add onto the funding issues that, like you said, there is a noticeable lack of drivers. They don't get benefits, they get shit pay, AND they have to have a Driver's License endorsement that entitles them to MUCH better opportunities in private sector.
Not that I'm saying any of this applies to this scenario or excuses it, but until you actually get a glimpse into the sausage factory it's really easy to mischaracterize something as complex as insuring a bus for every child who needs it as a simple problem. I'm willing to speak for Transportation Directors across all schoolboards that the overwhelming majority of them are absolutely terrified of this scenario occurring in their district.
Edit: I will add that even though it was a relatively podunk district with some of the most rural locals in my state, the district I worked for did insist that they do house-to-house, meaning none of that 1/2 mile - 1 mile stops. And they elected to do that themselves.
One of the big issues is that school districts get funding based on things like property taxes, or geographic location. The result is that affluent districts or schools are will funded and have good services, and others do not. There may also be some willful underfunding in some places as well by folks that balk at any taxes or bonds that don't help them immediately.
However, even an underfunded district should have been able to see this plan would have issue and raised a red flag with the community in advance.
I didn’t really live that rural.. I… don’t think? but I was dropped off a half mile walk from my house because the bus would have had to back up a quarter mile to actually drop me off any closer, and I’d still have to walk a quarter mile because the bus couldn’t get down the gravel driveway. One side was a 26-foot deep man made pond (17 foot deep at the dam), the other side was a 15 foot drop into a marsh, with a dam between them passing under the driveway. Nothin doin.
When we got new drivers some of them tried but it was so uncomfortable for me to have caused that situation I just told them not to bother… I was 10, used to it, so it was whatever.
When I was like 13 my mom forgot to pick me up from wrestling practice and I had to walk 12 miles home in the dark along the highway. She didn’t realize I wasn’t there until I walked in at like 10:30.. That wasn’t a lot of fun. That’s not really related to the bus issue, other than I wasn’t really that far from the school, I just felt the need to offload it. :)
Something I haven't seen in the comments but is very important to the equation.... Louisville has a very messed up bussing situation and has for years.
I'm not SUPER aware of the details, but that's because I live on the southern Indiana side of the river (just miles away from Louisville). My wife moved over here years ago specifically to avoid this issue for her kid before he was in the school system.
Louisville has a long standing policy where there is some sort of lottery that chooses what school you go to, rather than your school being determined by your nearest available.
The idea was clearly based on good intentions... to ensure that kids from any neighborhood would have the same opportunities, etc etc.
However, in reality it is a nightmare. Louisville isn't the largest metro area or the most sprawling, but still, trying to bus students from every school to every part of the county is ridiculous.
I think they made some changes in the past few years to make it easier to get a closer school, but again I'm not super up to date on it because it doesn't affect me other than the bus routes being an issue every year and hearing about it on the local news.
It's gotten worse and worse over the years though.
Again, I'm sure there are much more informed people with better info on this out there, but until they jump in I figured I'd add some pertinent info since this isn't a local lemmy community.
Maybe they should buy a second bus. Or maybe even a third...
OMG I'd be so pissed. Like, I'd weather just pick them up myself, or track the bus down and pull them off of it.
For a time, I lived an hour from my school. Caught the bus at about 530am, and got home at like 5ish. Very rural area in the Mojave desert. But this is just so bad.
I'm not familiar with your school background, but I suspect a watershed distinction is rural vs urban districts. I've had kids in both, and in rural districts, the buses are important, but not as vital for in-town kids as in the metro areas. I'n the rural districts as many kids were dropped off by car or public transit as took the school buses. In the metro areas, the bus might be required or effectively the only option.
It's all speculation, but this isn't Podunk Kentucky; this is Louisville. This is really something a metro of nearly a million people should have figured out by now. But easy to Monday morning quarterback, and I do sympathize with the funding constraints and public apathy.
You're right and it's on me for not reading the article to understand that this is Louisville so it does make for a much, much different experience than my region.
My bus ride home from school was about an hour when I was in middle school. I thought that sucked, lol.
The elementary school in my town is slightly over half a mile away. No buses here, not sure what the issue is with having a bus stop up to a half mile away.
I mean, the lack of sidewalk for the k-5 kids is a big deal depending on the type of road and how busy it is. The busses not getting kids home until 10 pm is beyond the pale.
Plus a 6 am pickup for k-5 means the kids are walking to the bus stop around dawn or even in the dark parts of the year, with no sidewalk. The school could be miles away which in city traffic could be significant, and many folks don't have other options.
What a terrible situation for the kids and families.
True.
Clearly a Kentucky education failed you too.
This is Louisville, a city with a metro area of about 400 square miles and a population of about 800,000
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