A JCPS audit confirms the busing system is a disaster. But we already knew that.
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then Jefferson County Public Schools Superintendent Marty Pollio is certainly on that road—and he’s taking more than 95,000 students with him.
We all watched in August when the first day of school imploded on itself due to Pollio’s “transportation disaster.” Some young students didn’t get home until after bedtime and school was canceled for several days so the district could figure out short-term fixes to get public school families through the school year.
At the board's request, JCPS also hired Prismatic Services to investigate what went wrong. The consultant company’s report was released ahead of Tuesday’s board meeting where they almost unnecessarily voted to remove busing for Magnet students. Prismatic’s founder Tatia Prieto, Ph.D. presented findings to the board and stressed moving one-or-two pieces at a time. “I question the need to make that drastic cut now,” she said, “we have some time.” Thankfully the board listened to her advice along with community speakers, including students, who urged the board to not do anything drastic when it came to busing magnet students. The Board tabled the vote so the information could be digested. Prieto advised JCPS to make incremental improvements.
Report on JCPS transportation plan unearthed chaos
The report unearthed a planning and implementation process filled with missing data, miscommunications, lack of due diligence, inadequate preparation and marked JCPS as a “corporate culture” that doesn’t value the feedback or expertise of the people who would be charged with seeing the plan through successfully.
According to this report, JCPS administration failed on the simplest of tasks, such as checking references prior to contracting AlphaRoute, the Boston-based firm, who designed the new busing system. Both Cincinnati and Columbus had already gone down this path with AlphaRoute. Neither of these nearby cities were happy with the product and both dropped the software as a result. Had JCPS done their due diligence and reached out to these school districts they could have made better choices.
Staggered JCPS start times: It made bus issues worse for the drivers – and my family
The report lays out 16 recommendations based on the information they received, noting that missing data prevented further guidance in certain circumstances.
Three of the 16 recommendations centered on adjusting school start times. These changes had many of us scratching our heads when they were announced last year, but one of the reasons Pollio stated the changes were needed was because the district could not maintain the number of routes it was running with the number of bus drivers it employed. But Monday's report shows that the new bell schedule actually added unnecessary burden on busing.
Also, in a Transportation Summary Report dated 2023 the second bullet point answers the question “Why change start and end times?” It reads: “Our current transportation system is the most complex across the nation which results in inefficiencies.” Prismatic's report fact-checked this claim against its own expertise having worked with more than 200 school districts. They wrote that JCPS “is indeed a complex system of interdependent processes. However, it is no more complex than Prismatic has encountered in many other school districts. Likewise, Prismatic did not ?nd the JCPS system to be the ‘most complex in the nation’ or that its complexity ‘led to ine?ciencies.’”
Teachers, bus drivers and school staff deserve better
Reading this report, I can’t help but think of the JCPS staff who are doing the work every day for our community’s students and how they must feel. Our amazing teachers are underpaid and working second jobs to get by while still showing up for our kids. Our bus drivers are charged with getting children to school safely without taking bathroom breaks and without help addressing unruly behavior in route. But they still go above and beyond because they care about the children. Like driver Larry Farrish Jr. who recently made national news when he bought pajamas for a student who was upset that he couldn’t participate in Pajama Day.
Transportation disaster report: What are your thoughts? Submit your letter to the editor here.
JCPS has wonderful people working hard to do right by the kids in our community. Our school and transportation personnel deserve an infrastructure that supports the consequential task of educating the children of Louisville.
Our students deserve a school system that supports their hearts, minds and learning in a way that is embedded in the institution's very foundation.
The school board, committees and Superintendent Pollio must take these recommendations to heart and really do some soul searching as to how they’ve allowed the school system’s good work to be undermined by their poor processes and implementation.
This editorial was written by Bonnie Jean Feldkamp on behalf of The Courier Journal Editorial Board. Feldkamp is the Opinion Editor and can be reached at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: JCPS busing system is a disaster, audit confirms. Kids deserve better