Kentucky school district rushes to fix bus route mess that canceled school and outraged parents

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — An overly ambitious redesign of bus routes for the Louisville school district turned into a logistical collapse on the first day of school, forcing schools to close when administrators said Friday students could stay home part of next week. until the mess is unraveled.

Parents were furious and some state politicians pushed for changes in the sprawling urban district after some of the 96,000 students weren’t picked up for school Wednesday morning or came home hours late, with some arriving after dark.

“They had all summer to figure this out and they couldn’t figure it out,” said Berkley Collins, a mother of two students in Jefferson County Public Schools.

Another horrified father, Beau Kilpatrick, said one of his young daughters was covered in urine when he finally got home at 9:15 p.m. He called it a “total failure” on the part of the district.

“They were hungry,” she said of her two grade-school children. “They were thirsty. They couldn’t use the bathroom. They were scared because they just wanted to get home.”

On a day that began with such excitement for the start of a new school year, her children came home heartbroken, Kilpatrick said. He too was heartbroken.

After just one disastrous day, Kentucky’s largest district is reexamining the bus route system designed by AlphaRoute, a Massachusetts-based consulting firm that uses computer algorithms to plot routes and stops.

It could take until the middle of next week to resolve the issues sufficiently for classes to resume, Superintendent Marty Pollio said Friday, promising to give parents plenty of notice before Monday.

“I’ve said it from the beginning, I take responsibility for myself,” Pollio said at a news conference, repeating his earlier apology to families, bus drivers and school staff.

He said the district should have anticipated that the new plan did not leave enough time for buses to get from one stop to another, especially on the first day of school when delays are likely.

The reform was aimed at solving a basic math problem for the district: Last school year, it didn’t have enough drivers to cover all the routes. As a result, thousands of children lost significant amounts of instructional time, as some drivers doubled and tripled.

The redesigned plan reduced the number of bus routes in response to the driver shortage.

Pollio said the district will have to stick to the new plan, which he admitted is “not perfect.”

“But it’s going to be much more efficient and our communication will be much better with families and schools,” he said. “We want to make sure we get it right before we put kids back on a school bus.”

The district has 65,000 bus riders, according to its website.

Assessing blame for the opening day fiasco, the superintendent said he was “not going to put it on the company,” referring to AlphaRoute, adding that it was more an issue with implementation.

Pollio also stressed that he was not blaming the bus drivers, and district officials acknowledged that the system faced a “big learning curve” in carrying out the new plan. Prior to the start of the school year, the bus drivers had several days to practice their routes and continued to practice on Thursdays and Fridays.

AlphaRoute said in a statement that the “full range of root causes” for the issues was not yet clear.

“We recognize that the situation was extremely unfortunate and likely caused by the significant changes to the bus routes,” the company said. “Combined with their new school assignment model, this is a substantial change.”

Tiesha Calbert experienced the problems both as a mother and as a director of a child care center.

She says the district moved a school bus stop that was right in front of the center. There are now multiple stops between 1 block and 2 1/2 blocks away. A child with special needs waited more than 3 hours for a bus that never came, she said.

Calbert said the state requires him to sign the kids out, but he doesn’t have enough people to follow them to their bus stops and wait with them.

“I have to figure out what we are going to do,” he said. “I’m not going to let these kids go out and wander around for hours again.”

A group of state lawmakers representing Jefferson County districts called Wednesday’s chaos “the last straw,” saying the debacle “must be the catalyst for change” in the school system.

Lawmakers said they will push legislation to ensure students have the right to attend their neighborhood schools. They called for a commission to evaluate the division of the school system, claiming that the district is currently “too big to manage properly.” They also called for changes in the local school board.

Many other districts across the country are experiencing a similar shortage of bus drivers.

A survey of school system leaders conducted between October and December 2022 found staff shortage they weren’t nearly as severe compared to fall 2021, but many reported problems finding enough substitute teachers, special education teachers, and bus drivers. In the American School District Panel Survey, 45% of district leaders reported a “significant shortage” of bus drivers.

Ohio’s Columbus City Schools experienced its own turmoil in 2022 that led to mid-school-year changes to its transportation plan, which it blamed on its own driver shortage as well as problems with a new software system. The district had a contract with AlphaRoute for the software, the Columbus Dispatch reported.

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Loller reported from Nashville, Tennessee.