6 ms·

Kentucky school system closes after first day: ‘transportation disaster’

32 points by soared 3y ago

bell-cot 3y ago
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.
- delfinom 3y ago
  > not immediately firing the engineering firm I think calling it an engineering firm is insulting to the normal users of the term. This is a startup that labels itself as "MIT" big brained and clearly incompetent at even calculating travel times on the very routes they print out. Unfortunately, government is the easiest customer to fleece by a shitty company.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  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.
  - bell-cot 3y ago
    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".
    - fragmede 3y ago
      Why that, and not good ole fashioned nepotism and corruption?
      - bell-cot 3y ago
        Least Hypothesis. (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.)
  - delfinom 3y ago
    >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.
    - bell-cot 3y ago
      > ...nationwide shortage...isn't attractive... 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.)
    - pavel_lishin 3y ago
      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.)
    - jdkee 3y ago
      Increase their pay until there is no longer a "shortage" of drivers.
      - renewedrebecca 3y ago
        Why in the world was this downvoted?
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    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.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > buses in every direction every day on property taxes alone i.e., public transportation.
    - bell-cot 3y ago
      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.
- xunil2ycom 3y ago
  All I know is, I want to see that post-mortem report.
- jccalhoun 3y ago
  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
KennyFromIT 3y ago
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.
- landemva 3y ago
  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...".
- bell-cot 3y ago
  True, but... 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".
- toast0 3y ago
  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.
jnwatson 3y ago
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.
- gnu8 3y ago
  You believe the traveling salesman problem for 100k students at 165 schools can be figured out with pencil and paper in a few hours?
  - pavel_lishin 3y ago
    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.
    - purpleflame1257 3y ago
      Additionally, you don't actually need the optimum, you just need a "good enough" method so that kids aren't on the bus till 10
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > It's 165 separate problems, of getting (presumably, on average) 1k students to 1 school If you have 165 * (1,000 / capacity) busses and drivers, sure.
      - pavel_lishin 3y ago
        That's a good point, I hadn't considered that! A good lesson for me, and maybe others, to not confidently offer opinions on areas where we're not even close to being subject matter experts.
eutropia 3y ago
Louisville resident here. 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".
- pavel_lishin 3y ago
  Waking a child up at 7am for school seems harsh enough; if someone told me my child had to be up at 5am, I'd tell them to pull my other leg.
  - gs17 3y ago
    Not even just up at 5, they need to be ready and out the door.
- 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gavinhoward 3y ago
Former school bus driver here. 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.
sct202 3y ago
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. https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/education/2022/11/15/columbus-city-schools-will-be-updating-all-bus-routes-starting-january/69648509007/ https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/education/2022/11/15/col...
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  Perhaps they optimize for maximum vendor lock-in, marketing persuasion, and recurring profits rather than user satisfaction, time, cost, or publicity?
glonq 3y ago
The real crime here is kids going back to school in the middle of August. I thought that school was supposed to start in September. Why so early?
- cafard 3y ago
  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.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  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.
  - glonq 3y ago
    Okay, starting early to fit harvest break makes sense. thx; TIL!
- toast0 3y ago
  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. [1] https://www.jefferson.kyschools.us/sites/default/files/Parent%20Calendar.pdf https://www.jefferson.kyschools.us/sites/default/files/Paren... [2] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/statereform/tab1_1-2020.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/statereform/tab1_1-2020.asp
glonq 3y ago
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.
sverona 3y ago
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. Just leaving that here.
- pavel_lishin 3y ago
  > they emphasized over and over that their bus drivers were "replaceable." I sure hope everyone who's saying that was planning on showing up on today to drive those buses.
1letterunixname 3y ago
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. mind.blown()

32 points by soared 3y ago

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.

delfinom 3y ago
> not immediately firing the engineering firm I think calling it an engineering firm is insulting to the normal users of the term. This is a startup that labels itself as "MIT" big brained and clearly incompetent at even calculating travel times on the very routes they print out. Unfortunately, government is the easiest customer to fleece by a shitty company.
lotsofpulp 3y ago
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.
- bell-cot 3y ago
  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".
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Why that, and not good ole fashioned nepotism and corruption?
    - bell-cot 3y ago
      Least Hypothesis. (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.)
- delfinom 3y ago
  >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.
  - bell-cot 3y ago
    > ...nationwide shortage...isn't attractive... 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.)
  - pavel_lishin 3y ago
    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.)
  - jdkee 3y ago
    Increase their pay until there is no longer a "shortage" of drivers.
    - renewedrebecca 3y ago
      Why in the world was this downvoted?
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  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.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > buses in every direction every day on property taxes alone i.e., public transportation.
  - bell-cot 3y ago
    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.
xunil2ycom 3y ago
All I know is, I want to see that post-mortem report.
jccalhoun 3y ago
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

KennyFromIT 3y ago

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.

landemva 3y ago
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...".
bell-cot 3y ago
True, but... 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".
toast0 3y ago
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.

jnwatson 3y ago

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.

gnu8 3y ago
You believe the traveling salesman problem for 100k students at 165 schools can be figured out with pencil and paper in a few hours?
- pavel_lishin 3y ago
  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.
  - purpleflame1257 3y ago
    Additionally, you don't actually need the optimum, you just need a "good enough" method so that kids aren't on the bus till 10
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > It's 165 separate problems, of getting (presumably, on average) 1k students to 1 school If you have 165 * (1,000 / capacity) busses and drivers, sure.
    - pavel_lishin 3y ago
      That's a good point, I hadn't considered that! A good lesson for me, and maybe others, to not confidently offer opinions on areas where we're not even close to being subject matter experts.

eutropia 3y ago

Louisville resident here. 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".

pavel_lishin 3y ago
Waking a child up at 7am for school seems harsh enough; if someone told me my child had to be up at 5am, I'd tell them to pull my other leg.
- gs17 3y ago
  Not even just up at 5, they need to be ready and out the door.
3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

gavinhoward 3y ago

Former school bus driver here. 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.

sct202 3y ago

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. https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/education/2022/11/15/columbus-city-schools-will-be-updating-all-bus-routes-starting-january/69648509007/ https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/education/2022/11/15/col...

1letterunixname 3y ago
Perhaps they optimize for maximum vendor lock-in, marketing persuasion, and recurring profits rather than user satisfaction, time, cost, or publicity?

glonq 3y ago

The real crime here is kids going back to school in the middle of August. I thought that school was supposed to start in September. Why so early?

cafard 3y ago
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.
mrguyorama 3y ago
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.
- glonq 3y ago
  Okay, starting early to fit harvest break makes sense. thx; TIL!
toast0 3y ago
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. [1] https://www.jefferson.kyschools.us/sites/default/files/Parent%20Calendar.pdf https://www.jefferson.kyschools.us/sites/default/files/Paren... [2] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/statereform/tab1_1-2020.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/statereform/tab1_1-2020.asp

glonq 3y ago

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.

sverona 3y ago

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. Just leaving that here.

pavel_lishin 3y ago
> they emphasized over and over that their bus drivers were "replaceable." I sure hope everyone who's saying that was planning on showing up on today to drive those buses.

1letterunixname 3y ago

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. mind.blown()