Jefferson County school busing: Not as bad as last year is supposed to be good?

The ACT score release had me tied up last week, but searching through the Courier-Journal’s web site today, this very short article popped up.

It says, “Last JCPS student off bus at 6:15 p.m. Thursday.”

The article goes on to say the last student got home on the first day of school about an hour later (it was 7:13 p.m., per another Courier article).

School gets out in Jefferson County at 3:45 PM. So, on day one of school, some poor kid was stuck somewhere between school and home at the end of the school day for 3-1/2 hours. It only got reduced to 2-1/2 hours in this transportation maze on Thursday for another kid (maybe the same one?). As one astute Courier reader pointed out, you can drive to Cincinnati in that amount of time.

If the district keeps this up, it may not take until spring for stories to start appearing about the violence on the buses.

After all, the kids already have had a year of ‘bus boredom education’ to get them ready.

Jefferson County school bus director clueless about increase in incidents

I guess the violence on Jefferson County school buses will finally stop – after school shuts down.

Meanwhile, the Courier-Journal reports that the director of transportation, Rick Caple, says he didn’t know that there had been a sharp rise in reported bus incidents in the last two years.

Yeah, Right!

Someone in Jefferson County must have learning disabilities, and they are running this crazy system.

It’s time to split this monster school district up and return to a neighborhood schools system. We need to do that so proper focus can finally be directed to those schools where staff doesn’t perform.

Right now, Jefferson County is just hiding problems by moving kids all over the place while a superintendent with too many schools to watch inevitably winds up missing some really big problems. Problems like the fact that the majority of the Persistently Low-Achieving Schools in Kentucky are found in this one district.

It’s clearly time for the state to move in, as Jefferson County seems incapable of learning the obvious lessons here, and thousands of kids are suffering for that ignorance.

Jefferson County schools think because they are bigger, they can be ‘badder’

It’s becoming a typical pattern for Jefferson County Public Schools – dispute every number that shows you are doing poorly instead of digging in to make changes that improve things.

Fox41 reports Jefferson County tops the state for the most problems in a new report on school safety.

Fox also says Jack Jacobs, a spokesperson for Jefferson County Public Schools, claims that comparing the district to other districts in the state is unfair because Jefferson County is so large.

Now, hold on a minute. The new school safety report isn’t based on student counts; it’s based on percentages. Jefferson County isn’t at a disadvantage with that approach.

Besides, while most of the state’s school systems saw a reduction in school safety incidents, the trend went the other way in Jefferson County. That isn’t defensible.

I guess Jefferson County school folks think it’s OK to be bad if you are bigger.

It’s interesting to read some of the comments to this Fox article and ones in the Courier-Journal's coverage.

The district’s crazy busing plan gets mentioned more than once.


Could the busing plan be adding to violence issues? Certainly, recent reports highlighted in this blog show that the buses in Jefferson County are far from peaceful.

Meanwhile, WHAS reports student aimed BB gun at school bus

The school bus stories from Louisville are growing faster than burley in Kentucky summer.

The latest from WHAS-TV says a 10-year old pulled a BB gun and aimed it at his school bus just after getting off.

The student had been in an argument prior to disembarking.

The article doesn’t clearly say so, but the way the event is described makes it sound like the student had the BB gun in his school pack all day long.

Great security there!

Jefferson Co. School Bus Drivers Start Speaking Out

Jefferson Co. School Bus Drivers Start Speaking Out

Fox41 interviews a Jefferson County Public Schools bus driver and the director of the busing program in this interesting article, which also has a video.

A few points:

• One of the few school bus monitors (an adult riding ‘shotgun’) had her nose broken – by an elementary school student!

• Some bus routes have fights almost daily.

• Elementary school students are the biggest problem (which makes sense because only the elementary schools are currently subjected to the full busing for integration plan. Just wait until they add middle schools to the plan next year).

• Fighting breaks out more frequently on the Interstates (what a great opportunity for a high speed crash disaster).

• Jefferson County’s busing director says they only have 40 cameras installed in their fleet of 930 buses. Cameras cost $1,800 each to install (Wow!). That would make a $1.6 million price tag to equip the entire fleet.

• Busing monitors are limited due to prohibitive costs. The district’s busing director says it would cost another four to five million to put monitors on all buses.


When will Jefferson County figure out that this expensive program, which has to be turning a lot of children off to education, is unaffordable, unworkable, and child (and maybe bus driver) hostile?

Wouldn’t concentrating on improving education in the neighborhood schools do a whole lot more to create real integration by improving the economic standing of West End Louisvillians?

Bashing on buses continues on in Louisville

But, who is doing it?

Fox41 now reports the latest on school bus violence in Louisville is actually a mystery.

Did a school bus driver assault a child, or were the kids acting up?

I like one of the comments that points out much of this would not be happening if the school district wasn’t subjecting kids to unreasonably long bus rides. That common sense observation is apparently beyond comprehension for the Jefferson County education system.

Meanwhile, Jefferson County keeps running up a multi-million dollar price tag for buses, drivers, and diesel to support its unreasonable busing plan while the Herald-Leader fusses about a lack of money for Kentucky’s schools.

If Jefferson County stopped almost literally burning up money, they might have enough to do some pretty credible preparation for the new education standards, which take effect next year.

As things stand, instead of teacher preparation, the Louisville area’s school district is turning money into diesel into carbon dioxide and a lot of other products of combustion that seem to be hindering, rather than helping, educate the city’s children.

Hundreds of parents tell Fox41: Bullying continues on Louisville’s school buses

Finally, the real dimensions of the violence and bullying on Jefferson County’s school buses are starting to emerge. Fox41-TV in Louisville reports receiving hundreds of calls from parents of children who have been bullied.

Bruised and swollen faces and broken arms just can’t be part of a high quality educational experience.

Read more details and catch a Fox41 video here.

Clearly, the district’s buses are beyond its control. A district spokeswoman even admits that putting monitors and cameras on buses isn't the answer, admitting they "have a lot of situations where those things haven't worked."

Parents are starting to sue. That will likely drive the taxpayers’ bill for this expensive, child-hostile nonsense to even higher levels.

Courier Confusion

How many kids got sent all over creation during Jefferson County Schools’ opening day?


It’s kind of amusing. The Courier-Journal doesn’t seem to be able to get its numbers straight about the number of kids who got home really, really late on the chaotic opening day of schools in the newspaper’s own home town.

On August 31, 2010, in “JCPS may delay new assignment plan for middle, high schools,” Courier reporter Toni Konz said 400 kids were impacted.

Back on Sunday, a Courier editorial said it was only 200 kids.

Of course, that Sunday editorial was trying to take a shot at State Senators David Williams and Dan Seum for being concerned enough about the mess in Jefferson County to propose a bill to protect parent and student rights to choose a school close to their home.

I guess when the Courier wants to take shots at legislators it’s perfectly OK to cut numbers in half whenever it suits the editors’ purposes. Or, maybe some of the Courier’s editors got too much of a dose of that “fuzzy math” our kids have been getting in KERA schools for the past 20 years.

By the way, I’d not be surprised if even the 400 number Toni Konz reported were actually low. I am hearing from parents who have children in other schools besides the three where the 400 kids supposedly got badly misrouted on opening day.

And, just today I heard that a bus that had been dropping kids from Cochran Elementary off at 5:15 PM or later suddenly dropped kids off without parents waiting a half-hour early at 4:45. Five year olds got to walk home, crossing busy Louisville streets, on their own thanks to this latest busing gaff.

If you are a Jefferson County parent who knows of other continuing problems with the busing program, let us know.

Courier needs a GPS to avoid the road to disaster

They are already heading down that road, but some don’t know it



GPS car navigation units are great. Can’t read a map? No problem – a GPS can give you step-by-step voice directions to get you to your destination. It can even nag you if you make a wrong turn.

It’s too bad there isn’t an 'education system GPS,' because the editors at the Courier-Journal clearly need one. Their local school system is already headed down the wrong road, but the editors don’t even know it. They need an ‘education GPS’ nagging them that an hour-long school bus ride for a five year old is just too long when other options are available, and the resulting loss of education readiness in that child just too high a price to pay.

Read more »

No mayoral candidate in Louisville will defend the city’s school busing plan

WAVE-3 just interviewed the major mayoral candidates in Louisville about the city’s insane busing plan.

Even the most wishy-washy response made it clear that none of the candidates favors trapping kids on buses for two hours a day. All seem open to the need for changes.

Sometimes, the right choice is so obvious that it even crosses all the political lines. Two hours on a bus every day is too long.

So, why is it that such universally held opinions still escape the education crowd?

Jefferson County Schools' busing mess: Child lost two days in a row

WAVE-3 has the details, including a video interview with the child’s mom, here.

This is what happens when social engineering tries to trump education in neighborhood schools.

When will the people in Louisville wake up?

Jefferson County busing plan hits court

(Updated with graph 7 Aug 10)

With the count of parents who have joined the lawsuit against the incredibly bad busing plan in Louisville now up to 13, the case is finally in court.


Per the Courier-Journal, the court discussion gravitated towards a discussion of the performance of Jefferson County schools and why parents are unhappy. One example listed was a comparison of the Dunn and King Elementary Schools.

The news report says that parent attorney J. Bruce Miller “insinuated” that King Elementary is inferior, citing as an example numerous spelling and grammar mistakes available for public view in the school’s web site.

Well, there’s no need to insinuate. The performance in these two schools is dramatically different, as the most recent proficiency rates in the five Kentucky Core Content Test subjects in this graph show (I assembled the graph from data in each school’s Interim Performance Report for 2009, available with the menus presented here).


Very simply, the performance gaps in proficiency rates in these two schools are quite dramatic.

The 2009 No Child Left Behind results for the two schools are also dramatically different. Dunn’s 2009 NCLB Adequate Yearly Progress Report shows it met all nine of its targets and thus met Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). King’s report shows it only met 8 of 12 targets, a rather low performance of only 66.7 percent. King failed to make AYP in 2009. It also failed to make AYP in 2008. Find each school's 2009 NCLB report with the menus provided here.

However, King is not in NCLB Tier status due to a serious loophole that the Jefferson County busing plan has exposed. When the enrollment in a school changes by 20 percent or more, that school’s NCLB “counter” gets reset to zero. So, instead of King being in Tier 1 status for failing to make AYP two years in a row, it isn’t in any NCLB trouble.



I’ve written about how busing has shredded NCLB in Jefferson County before, but I would not be surprised if the lawyer for the school district or its superintendent tries to fool the public by claiming the district has reduced the schools in NCLB Tier status. I suspect it has, but that is only because of this loophole that busing can seriously exploit.

There was more nonsense in the Courier’s report, and you can click the “Read more” link below to learn about that.

Read more »

Jefferson county school bus mess degenerates even more

Daycare centers are being cut out of bus routes, causing more pain for parents


Every time I think the Jefferson County school bus mess is about to calm down, I’m proved wrong.



This time, the school district’s busing tsars are disrupting sometimes long-term arrangements between working parents and their day care centers.

Check out this WAVE-3 article to learn about Jefferson County Public Schools latest busing headache.

Make it 10

More families join lawsuit against Jefferson County busing plan

Adding to a story we’ve been tracking for some time, Wave-3 TV reports that still more families have joined the lawsuit against the Jefferson County Public Schools’ onerous busing plan that offers little hope that bad schools will improve.

This busing plan forces some Jefferson County Kindergarten and first grade kids to ride buses for an hour each way to school while negotiating at least one bus change in the process.

The plan creates no inducement for Jefferson County’s bad schools to improve. It just results in those schools messing up the lives of different students while adding huge extra costs for non-education enhancing diesel fuel, school buses and drivers. “Green” it’s not!

Jefferson County busing plan rolling right over parents and kids

School system denies 70 percent of parent requests to avoid onerous busing plan

The Jefferson County school bus juggernaut continues rolling – right over the best interests of students and parents.

Now, the Courier-Journal reports that 70 percent of parent requests for transfers out of the busing chaos, about 1,200 of them, have been turned down.

Instead, Kindergarten and first grade students will be forced to ride buses up to an hour each way to school, sometimes having to negotiate a bus transfer in the process.

And, parents with legitimate hardship situations are really upset.

For example, Brandy Schad doesn’t think she got treated fairly. Schad’s husband has Crohn’s disease and Schad tried to get her son assigned to a school where the family could get help when her husband was hospitalized, which apparently happens frequently and without warning.

Now Schad is interested in joining the growing lawsuit against the busing plan. As of July 12th, a total of five parents were interested in joining the suit. Now, the Courier reports the count of parents seeking to join the suit is up to eight.

The really sad part of all of this is that just throwing different kids into a low-achieving school isn’t likely to improve education in that facility. It’s just going to wreck the lives of different children. If Jefferson County schools would get serious about improving the performance of its schools, then the pressure to bus would pretty much go away.

And, I just can’t see any caring parent of any race getting excited about their child being forced to spend two hours on a school bus every single day. Whether that bus is headed to Louisville’s upscale Eastern end or its urban Western section, after an hour ride the kids are going to arrive at the school door already tired, bored, and not in much of a mood for learning.

Jefferson County anti-busing lawsuit growing

The Jefferson County Public School system’s ill-advised school bus plan, which has wrecked havoc on No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top school accountability, is being challenged in court.

Now, the Courier-Journal reports more parents are joining the lawsuit, which argues that state law gives children the right to attend their nearest school.

Jefferson County Schools argue the law does not apply because it only pertains to separate school districts that merge. However, the base law dates back to 1942, and I suspect the huge Jefferson County system of today was created by a merger of older, separate school districts after 1942.

So, this one will be interesting to watch.

And, regardless of what happens with this suit, the problem of Jefferson County being able to subvert both state and federal school accountability laws simply by changing busing plans each year remains as a serious challenge. The Kentucky Department of Education and the Kentucky Board of Education have yet to get a handle on that.