This clusterfuck has lead to the first week of school effectively being canceled. 88 Bus drivers quit after that first day - they had been set up to fail. The facts I'm aware of at this point:
- Louisville has historically zany bus routes, do to a segregated population that goes back to redlining and diversity metrics for schools. Kids regularly get bussed across town instead of down the street, sometimes having to quickly change a second bus at chaotic depots with little time. The system was not great before this colossal failure of judgement.
- A bus driver 'shortage' (I'm somewhat understanding that a bureaucracy like a school district would have a hard time flexing their budget enough to fix the shortage, I assume changing allocation is laborious) ultimately caused by it not being a desirable-enough job.
- 750 routes were reduced to 600. I'm not sure about the theoretical math of that with respect to area covered, but local group messaging indicated that prior to this year, bus drivers might have had to drop off at two schools in the morning, and pick up from one in the afternoon. Now, most drivers had to go to three(!), four(!!), or (due to the routing company not having two schools in their data at all) FIVE(!!!!) schools on a route.
- Beyond the new routing, they also completely changed the school schedules to 'stagger' the starts for groups of kids and schools. Some kids were getting on the bus as early as 5am, and elementary school children were dismissed at like 2 in the afternoon; meanwhile some high school schedules ran past 5pm.
- Kids were indeed kept on busses for hours, small ones soiling themselves, many hungry, some missing medication - etc.
- Teachers had to report in Thursday and Friday despite the kids being on a 'snow-day' schedule. afaik they were called in to setup chromebooks.
- Only ONE school-board member voted against this plan. One. The rest thought "yeah seems good".
> Louisville has historically zany bus routes, do to a segregated population that goes back to redlining and diversity metrics for schools
Just to provide a lot of context, I am Black, I grew up in south GA. My still living parents were one of the last to graduate under Jim Crow rules and my mom was one of the first Black math teachers in one of the formerly White schools in the city. She fought to teach advance math classes because the school system wanted to have her teach all of the lower level classes so not to offend the upper class White students. She spent most of her 30 years as the department head.
She was also witness to the early integration initiatives where anyone could go to any school.
While the intention may have been good on the national level, what ended up happening when they did the school redistricting for integration, the predominately Black schools stayed Black, they assigned the poor White neighborhoods to the Black schools. They assigned the middle and upper class Black neighborhoods to the former White schools.
Meet the new boss…
Now in metro Atlanta, the upper richer neighborhoods just incorporate into their own city so they can segregate themselves from the “inner city schools” and keep their tax money.
No judgement: we had a house built in a former “sundown town” (the one that Oprah visited in the 80s”) because we knew that house prices would rise faster.
Since around 2013, builders have started moving in and building houses in Forsyth county overwhelming the inner, older core of Cumming.
People started migrating from other parts of Atlanta and other states because of the cheap new houses. We had our 3100 five bed/3.5 bath built here for $335K in 2016.
While we are very much a minority, the people who are moving in are somewhat more socially liberal. What I call “Romney Republicans”. They just care about low taxes, their guns and good schools. They could care less about the “war on woke” and are more worried about ChatGPT taking their jobs than “illegal immigrants”.
As far as feeling safe, it’s a mixed bag. My very big intimidating looking stepson who is a big teddy bear grew up in the burbs all of his life. His friendship circle is what we call the Rainbow Coalition and we have never had a problem with the parents of his (White) girlfriends.
But you can see the generational divide. We were at the movies and he saw a classmate - a White girl - he hadn’t seen awhile. He walked up to her and she jumped up and hugged him. Her mom hugged him. Her dad shook his hand. But her grand parents were obviously nervous at first. But shockingly not as nervous when their mutual friend who was White saw her first.
He wanted to walk to the local Waffle House after a game at night with one of his Black friends. We said he could only go if their White friend was going to walk with him (all three are roommates now and are inseparable). We were more worried about the police stopping them than anything else.
But as far as how my wife and I are treated. We are short and old and wear glasses. No one sees us a threat.
> Beyond the new routing, they also completely changed the school schedules to 'stagger' the starts for groups of kids and schools. Some kids were getting on the bus as early as 5am, and elementary school children were dismissed at like 2 in the afternoon; meanwhile some high school schedules ran past 5pm.
The details matter of course, but staggering start times is good for two things. a) seems like high school aged kids are more responsive to a later start time than younger kids, so better for the students maybe. b) staggered start time can reduce the number of busses and drivers needed if you don't want to mix kids of different age groups (which you probably don't!).
However, it comes with a big downside, cascading failure. If bus X does routes A, B, and C in order, and gets behind schedule for route A, route B starts behind schedule, and likely route C as well; depending on how far behind and how much slack is in the schedule.
For school bus routes, morning pickup can often recover, if the bus is late enough, some students will find an alternate route which means fewer pickups which speeds the route. For afternoon drop off, you're pretty stuck, drivers can't leave the school until loading finishes, even if it's delayed or just slow as students get used to the bus. Drivers can't skip drop offs when they're behind schedule.
Reducing the number of routes is probably required to match up the number of drivers with the number of routes... but if each route hits more points, the routes become longer and the slack between runs gets shorter.
The start time changes can of course make sense (e.g. teenagers later in the day), but a big issue for smaller kids ending significantly earlier is childcare. Who's going to look after your second grader from 2pm-5pm+ when you get off of work?
Keep in mind, the kids riding the bus are not the kids whose parents can drop them off and pick them up; and one of the education system's primary functions is childcare.
But sure, in principle - if you are thoughtful, changes from the status quo can be better.
> The start time changes can of course make sense (e.g. teenagers later in the day), but a big issue for smaller kids ending significantly earlier is childcare. Who's going to look after your second grader from 2pm-5pm+ when you get off of work?
This is like the daylight savings debate. Just like you can't make more daylight, just move it around the clock; the school system is only going to mind your kids for a certain number of hours, you can start it earlier or later, but they're going to do the number of hours they want, and you need to figure out the rest. Yes if you've got multiple generations of kids, and they all get home around the same time, the olders can mind the youngers, and you miss out on that if the olders get home much later because of staggering. But if your school district is an extensively bussed district and doesn't have the budget to attract enough drivers, you've got to make it up somehow.
In my area, we have a lot of bussing because of the rural nature, not for integration, but all of the congregate childcare options are accessible by busses (or are literally across the street from a school, and send a person to collect children at dismissal time and safely cross the street). Sending your children to congregate childcare certainly costs money though.
Hell, who's going to look at them at 5am if they're having to get up that early? You're asking probably working parents to sacrifice at least 2, if not more, hours of sleep. For parents who work overnights, they may not even be home yet.
Staggered schedules might make sense, but not the way this was done.
Calls for the superintendent's head; a lot of angry parents with sad or scared kids; district says they "will be reviewing bus routes and bus stops for efficiency. Drivers will also be practicing their routes, and get paid for those extra days of work. "
Yeah, no.
When the generated routes sometimes included roads which don't exist in KY and drivers can't complete the routes on time WITHOUT kids on the bus, there's no way they're getting this fixed in 4 days.
My kid isn't school aged yet and I know I will be voting out every single school board member during elections, with maybe the exception of the one who voted against. Of course, last election, people were campaigning against raising the portion of property tax dedicated towards the school district... you get what you pay for?
> - Kids were indeed kept on busses for hours, small ones soiling themselves, [...]
By the power of capitalistic optimizations and cost-cutting, we as a society have brought the advances of delivery driver working conditions even to children.
/s
How did we ever get coaxed into optimizing for cost reduction instead of for increasing quality of service?
The first day of school ended at a normal-ish time, and some kids still had not been dropped off by their busses at 10pm?
WTF is the district doing, not immediately firing the engineering firm that developed their bus routes, and suing them for gross incompetence??? A few old bus drivers - with just paper maps, pencils, rulers, and index cards - could have come up with a far better set of routes than that.
I would bet the government did not want to pay for enough bus drivers and the outside firm gave them plausible deniability for reducing quantity of buses/increasing length of bus routes.
There are probably fewer and fewer kids per any given distance, so transportation cost per student keep going up, but for a number of reasons, the funding is not maintained (unless a sufficiently big disaster like this occurs).
Funding for schools is also based on number of students, so funding is being reduced at the same time that transportation cost per student is increasing.
>I would bet the government did not want to pay for enough bus drivers and the outside firm
There's a nationwide shortage of bus drivers. Many retired during covid for good. It is shitty pay and often part-time hours. It really isn't attractive for many people these days, even for retirees.
This experience is at this point decades out of date, but when I was attending middle & high school in a moderately rural area, a fair amount of our bus drivers were teachers & janitorial staff.
(The former came in very handy when doing extra-curriculars - our debate coach could drive us to meets without incurring the cost of an extra adult to drive the bus. Of course, given that debate meets start early and finish late, and we still had to do the drive, in practice it meant that a very sleep-deprived and stressed out person driving somewhat erratically.)
All too true. OTOH, "we are X drivers short of the number that our new schedule says we gotta have!" would have been known well in advance. And, post-COVID, any competent engineering firm would have determined various driver staffing level cut-offs, below which the school district would have to operate on a reduced basis. (Closing all the elementary schools, or all schools in the east half of the district, or whatever.)
Fucking America: The only country in the world that can't afford public transportation because "It's too spread out" while they supposedly CAN afford to send out school buses in every direction every day on property taxes alone, even in the most rural of areas.
Living in a bit of America with a mostly-decent public bus system - no reasonable adult would consider "the bus stops here twice a day, and only on school days" to constitute a viable level of service. Even 10X that number of stops, averaged over a year, would be really marginal.
Yeah...though my bet would not be on "plausible deniability", but on "government was a bunch of suckers for the fancy language and dog/pony/smoke/mirrors shows which the engineering firm used to land the deal".
(And, if you are actually interacting with government officials or workers in the wake of a screw-up like this, and favor a more-positive outcome...then you'll get a lot further with "looks like you were suckered by smooth-talking outsiders" than with "looks like you are a bunch of crooks". Best that the latter hypothesis be very quietly investigated until and unless serious evidence is found.)
As I understand it some kids weren't picked up from the school until 7pm and weirdly some schools didn't dismiss until around 5pm anyway. Which is crazy but at least makes some more sense than how they could be on a bus for 6+ hours.
So still really really bad
This is not the first disaster for AlphaRoute. Columbus Public Schools in Ohio had similar issues last year. The company is probably promising large projected savings from optimizing and consolidating routes but those savings are infeasible in practice.
The district I drove for does not bus as much as this district, but it is still biggish.
When I did a route, we had to do three schools, but the start times for schools were staggered. It absolutely can work. In fact, we often had "layovers" between schools.
But this? This is messed up.
It can be done better than this. And if they just have too few drivers, they should just raise wages; my district did recently.
Let's put aside the technology not working for a second...
Isn't it ultimately leadership's responsibility to prevent these situations from occurring in the first place? Shouldn't they have been testing/auditing this system beforehand, addressing risks, and ensuring there were adequate operational plans ready in the event of an issue?
It's easy to blame software (even easier when that software clearly doesn't work), but blame ultimately should be on the people making the decisions along the way that led to this outcome.
I've never heard of a School Board which had even a "graduated high school" requirement to be a Member. Let alone any "experience in public schools, or running an organization" one.
And even before America's Culture Wars got mixed in, "School Board Member" was generally a crappy job - meager pay, indifferent social status, huge complexity, and the Board is where the buck stops for every student discipline case, delusionally-demanding parent, ill-paid teacher, incomprehensible regulation, and financial impossibility in the district. Add to that minimal thanks when they do get it right, minimal voter turn-out for their elections, and having to do all their work through the full-time school administration bureaucracy - which is almost always self-serving, usually a bit contemptuous of the Board, and almost never the "best and brightest".
School board should terminate so-called leadership, and themselves then resign.
Though this may have something to do with it, staffing blue collar drivers is being handled nation-wide, "...likely caused by the significant changes to bus routing which were made necessary by the district’s severe driver shortage...".
You can run simulations perhaps, but it's not really possible to test this outside of production.
Running the routes on the real streets on a non-school day would show if your routes are completely non-feasible, but traffic patterns are different on school days. The first week of school is almost always worse than the rest of the weeks because there tends to be more bunching.
With a totally new transit plan, there's going to be a lot of bottlenecks that are hard to discover.
You could maybe run a test of the new routes during the school day toward the end of the previous school year, but you would need an extra fleet of busses and drivers, so that's a big expense. Not to mention, some school districts finalize their transit plans weeks before the start date when enrollment is firm.
Former Louisvillian here. My friends tell me JCPS held a meeting the week before school started in which they emphasized over and over that their bus drivers were "replaceable." I don't know if they're unionized but given that there's a UAW lodge right off the Watterson I'd assume so.
This is not a big data problem. This isn’t even a small data problem.
Bus routes can be figured out with a paper and pencil in a few hours. I can’t possibly understand the level of incompetence required to get this wrong.
Bus drivers don’t need to “practice routes”. Even if they get a turn wrong, the worst is a few minute delay.
> Bus drivers don’t need to “practice routes”. Even if they get a turn wrong, the worst is a few minute delay.
A long vehicle that does not bend in the middle has quite a few worse outcomes than a short delay. Fill it with children, and those worse outcomes can include tragedies.
There are roads where the crest of the hill can result in the middle of the bus bottoming out, and the wheels at each end hanging in the air.
There are roads where a downhill section levels out at such a sharp angle that the nose of the bus will embed in the pavement if you do not cut all the way across the road (into oncoming traffic; which you will NOT want to do with children on board) to reduce the angle.
Some turns are simply impossible because the swing of the tail-end of the bus would e.g., take out the signage along the edge of the road.
Maps will show a road that appears to continue through, but it is actually discontinuous due to e.g., a canyon; Turning around / backing a 65-80 passenger vehicle is no fun. Worse when full of screaming kids. I had a route where I had no choice but to back a bus down a four block long alley where the mirrors literally scraped on both sides in places due to a doorstep stop for a disabled child, but you always want to avoid live "skills tests". Why on earth would you intentionally add avoidable risk?
All this while keeping in mind you need to maintain full awareness/control of the kids at all moments. Because, if you are distracted trying to correct an issue with your route and even something seemingly as minor as one kid stands up and falls, splitting his lip... You get to pull over and radio in to dispatch to call out the state highway patrol for a school bus accident, and wait for the officer to arrive and take the report. And, you get the points on your driving record (affecting insurance, etc.) as if this were an actual vehicle accident where you are at fault (at least in California).
Source: Drove school buses my first year in college in a large California city. Quit after another driver had a real accident and the district left her to defend herself against parents' lawsuits. Almost all drivers were college students because the state provided a subsidy to the school districts to hire us.
Our route making process was (this was years ago) Thomas guide map book -> left right sheet (a sheet with a column of just L/R streetname) for the route -> drive route to time/test and make corrections. One complication is that the start and end times of the route are fixed, so you must make the route work with those while accounting for traffic.
It's not a problem of getting 100k students to 165 schools.
It's 165 separate problems, of getting (presumably, on average) 1k students to 1 school. That's a much more tractable problem, and if you have a large-scale map and a lot of push-pins, you can probably intuit 90% of the solution.
Yes, the person you're replying to is probably under-estimating the problem, but this isn't a problem you have to rent quantum computing time to solve.
The problem is that the district in question has for a lot of reasons, many with good intentions, built this as a 100k separate problems. They wanted to abstract student assignment outside of geography and for the most part they have. They've lost the ability to just "push pin" the map because any way you slice it, it's now too much of a tangled spiderweb, because they don't want the map to make sense. They intentionally wanted to break map clusters and patterns. They can't rely on the map because they've built it so that they can't rely on the map. They've obviously built something that they can't scale easily, and it is a travelling salesman nightmare problem in so many of the harder ways.
(They did this to themselves of course, but suggesting that they just start over with push pins on a large enough scale map ignores why they are in the problem in the first place. The map doesn't make sense. There's no way to intuit a 90% solution because there aren't patterns on the map. They didn't want patterns on the map.)
I used to work in the transit industry. I can describe the problem and the solution with enough paper and a couple hours. But to actually perform route scheduling, we used a whole bunch of iron @ AWS.
The traveling salesmen problem is about the perfect solution, not a good one. The entire point of the traveling salesman problem in teaching is to show a problem where the human brain is really good at workable solutions, but computers cannot find solutions without cheating or checking EVERY solution.
American schools have been designing bus routes well before they had computers to help them do so. Maybe it requires hiring a few more bus drivers.
I did a brief stint in the transit industry, working on very large scale bus route scheduling & optimization. It's a tough problem to solve, but manageable as long as you don't do something silly like drastically cut the number of busses and drivers because you are expecting the routing/scheduling system to work miracles.
Wow, this is worse than my experience in California of the 80's and 90's with 90 minutes in each direction. I didn't think topping 3 hrs / day on the bus every day was possible.
Every school district manages their schedule differently, but looking at the Jefferson County school schedule [1], if you pushed the start date back four weeks into September, you push the schedule end of school into late June, with a possibility of makeup dates into July.
Kentucky has a minimum education days of 170, which is lower than many states (180 seems most common) [2] so maybe they have a bit more wiggle room, but it's mostly a system of tradeoffs, and planning for makeup days. My local school district starts the day after labor day, and ends mid June, but doesn't have week long breaks between the three-trimesters. I'm in favor of year round schooling with 'random' breaks interspersed, but I don't get to draft the schedule; and holding school in the hottest months requires buildings designed for education in those months, which is often not present; many school buildings would need significant investments in air conditioning etc to be conducive to education in the heat of summer.
In rural maine, we had a "harvest break" in the middle of the fall for kids to help their farming families bring in the potato harvest. For that, we would start a month early.
Those farms have been using almost exclusively illegal immigrants for labor for decades though so most school systems up there have removed "Harvest break" to give their kids longer summers.
I think it unfortunate that schools start before Labor Day and continue into June. As far as I can tell it is because of the number of added breaks, teacher in-service days, etc.
This clusterfuck has lead to the first week of school effectively being canceled. 88 Bus drivers quit after that first day - they had been set up to fail. The facts I'm aware of at this point:
- Louisville has historically zany bus routes, do to a segregated population that goes back to redlining and diversity metrics for schools. Kids regularly get bussed across town instead of down the street, sometimes having to quickly change a second bus at chaotic depots with little time. The system was not great before this colossal failure of judgement.
- A bus driver 'shortage' (I'm somewhat understanding that a bureaucracy like a school district would have a hard time flexing their budget enough to fix the shortage, I assume changing allocation is laborious) ultimately caused by it not being a desirable-enough job.
- 750 routes were reduced to 600. I'm not sure about the theoretical math of that with respect to area covered, but local group messaging indicated that prior to this year, bus drivers might have had to drop off at two schools in the morning, and pick up from one in the afternoon. Now, most drivers had to go to three(!), four(!!), or (due to the routing company not having two schools in their data at all) FIVE(!!!!) schools on a route.
- Beyond the new routing, they also completely changed the school schedules to 'stagger' the starts for groups of kids and schools. Some kids were getting on the bus as early as 5am, and elementary school children were dismissed at like 2 in the afternoon; meanwhile some high school schedules ran past 5pm.
- Kids were indeed kept on busses for hours, small ones soiling themselves, many hungry, some missing medication - etc.
- Teachers had to report in Thursday and Friday despite the kids being on a 'snow-day' schedule. afaik they were called in to setup chromebooks.
- Only ONE school-board member voted against this plan. One. The rest thought "yeah seems good".