Jefferson County busing mess headed to state’s high court

More tax dollars will go down legal drains and out school bus tailpipes as the Jefferson County Board of Education appeals their busing for integration program to the Kentucky Supreme Court.

WAVE-3 has the details.

Jefferson County school busing litigator takes Courier-Journal and school board to task

Lawyer Teddy Gordon has never been shy about his opinions of the continuing school busing mess in Jefferson County.

In his recent letter to the Courier-Journal, he nicely lays out all of the problems with this dragged out legal fight to insure that Jefferson County’s students get the same right that kids in almost every other part of the country enjoy – the right to attend the school nearest their home.

Busing nonsense in Louisville schools flunks court test

The Courier-Journal reports that by a 2 to 1 vote, the Kentucky Court of Appeals has ruled that the current school bus nonsense in Louisville, which buses five-year olds clear across the city in an attempt to make student racial demographics more even across the city, is illegal.

Showing that they will never understand that busing over the past 40 years has failed to create real educational equality or do anything to improve the chronically low-performing West End schools in Louisville, the Jefferson County education officials say they will waste still more time and dollars with an appeal to the Kentucky Supreme Court.

Talk about learning disabilities!

Jefferson County school busing flunks test

An education law professor and national expert on school busing plans has tarred and feathered the nonsense in Jefferson County.

The Courier-Journal quotes busing expert Gary Orfield, “The current plan isn’t working.”

Orfield says that his final recommended changes were far greater than he originally thought would be needed. In the end, the existing elementary school busing plan needs massive overhaul to cut travel times.

Orfield also saw right through Jefferson County’s “magnet” school nonsense, which turns the concept of true magnet schools on its ear. Per Orfield, the programs “Aren’t very magnetic.”

Orfield really gets one favorite Bluegrass Institute position:

“Students should pick schools,” he said, “not the other way around.”

Not everyone was impressed by the Orfield proposals. Teddy Gordon, the lawyer who won a 2007 US Supreme Court decision that threw out an earlier Jefferson County busing scheme certainly wasn’t buying this latest attempt to rework busing. Gordon asked, “How much more is JCPS going to rearrange the deck chairs on this Titanic?"

Most importantly, Gordon pointed out that busing “does not work in improving the education for any child in Louisville.”

Given the school system’s well-below average performance, including having five of the lowest scoring high schools in the recently announced ACT testing program, that is a pretty obvious conclusion to reach.

And, 40 years of busing has failed to fix the school district’s gruesome performance record.

Jefferson County busing madness takes hit in appeals court

The Republic from Columbus Indiana reports that the Jefferson County School Busing program doesn’t look too good to two of the three judges on a Kentucky appeals court. Opinions of a third jurist were not revealed during the hearing which did not render a final ruling in the case.

Read more »

Jefferson County busing madness heads back to court

WXIX news reports the Jefferson County school bus plan is headed for another court review to see if it complies with state law.

The Jefferson County school bus system requires some students to take bus rides clear across Louisville – trips that take more than an hour one way – even though schools are located much closer to a child’s residence and parents don’t want their children on the bus for so long.

The busing plan is an outgrowth of 40 years of busing to achieve integration. But, after four decades, if this idea was going to work, don’t you think by now the city would have been naturally integrated as minorities got better educations that enabled them to get better jobs and move to the more affluent and desirable parts of the city?

It will be interesting to see what the court decides.

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’s extreme school busing: It’s BACK!

WAVE-3.com reports that when school starts up again in Jefferson County schools on August 15th, some students will still face excessively long bus rides – over an hour one way – even though all kids there live much closer to a suitable school.

By the close of last year’s school term, those long hours on the bus were turning into the inevitable mayhem, with fights and disruptions a virtual daily occurrence.

Why is the learning curve for the people running this school district so shallow?

Meanwhile, the Courier-Journal is justifiably upset about the school board hiding a busing plan that might have cut down on the excesses. The paper has published two separate related editorials since this story broke on August 3, the first editorial ran on August 6 and the second on August 10.

Gubernatorial Candidate David Williams: Shut down Jefferson County Board of Education

Taking a cue from other large cities like New York and San Diego, Kentucky Senate President/Candidate for Governor David Williams is calling for a shut down of the Jefferson County Board of Education and transfer of power over schools to the mayor of Louisville.

It’s a dramatic proposal, but something better needs to happen in the Louisville school system, where a huge proportion of the state’s lowest performing schools are found and where dropouts and poor academic performance are an everyday fact of life.

Read more »

Wow! Other Louisville media jumping on the Courier-Journal

Stirred by Courier’s inept editorializing about new school superintendent

Louisville’s only daily newspaper has a real knack for making enemies.

As an unabashed, ultra-liberal advocacy journalism house, the Courier-Journal’s biases invite opposition from a wide-ranging group of people who long for a little balance in the newspaper’s extreme editorializing.

A great case in point is the story about the recent selection of Donna Hargens to be the new superintendent in the Jefferson County Public School District.

The tale starts with the Courier offering astonishing evidence that its editors consider Louisville’s train wreck of busing for school integration to be much more important than improving dismal academic performance in many of the city’s schools.

While admitting some Jefferson County schools “have been labeled ‘failures’ by the state,” the editor claimed that busing was “the most significant issue facing our schools.”

That diatribe continued with the Courier’s editors trashing Hargens, claiming she was not a sound candidate.

Only days later, in what may be a hopeful sign that the Jefferson County Board of Education is finally starting to distance itself a bit from the Courier’s misguided busing first nonsense, Hargens was selected as the next superintendent in Louisville.

Somewhere along the way, 84 WHAS-AM’s morning talk show host Mandy Connell took flak from the paper about comments on the superintendent selection. Connell, true to form, is giving back better than she got, including lining up the Bluegrass Institute’s Jim Waters as a regular show guest to talk facts about education in Kentucky and Louisville (listen for Jim every other Monday between 9 and 12 AM, starting today).

Now, another shot has been fired at Louisville’s only daily paper. It comes from Business First, Louisville’s local edition of the Business Journal.

Business First writes to Hargens:

“You’ll be reassured to know that most Louisvillians aren’t as narrow-minded and judgmental as a certain daily newspaper that threw you under the proverbial school bus before you even were selected for the job.”

Great insight, BizFirst!

Get some balance, Courier-Journal.

Or, how about this suggestion, Courier editors? Start running point-counterpoints on your editorial page. You will wind up looking pretty silly, but you might start to swell your bottom line once the only daily in Louisville starts to offer some reason in at least some of its editorial page offerings.

After all, this point-counterpoint works for the Gannett Papers flagship, USA Today. Are egos too small in Louisville to stand the same sort of discussions?

I am sure the Bluegrass Institute would be happy to offer counterpoints for you, as would the Family Foundation of Kentucky. I’ll bet those Tea Party guys you like to trash can offer a little fact instead of fiction to offset your more outrageous offerings, too.

Don’t forget, it works for USA Today.

BIPPS in Louisville Business First: The experience gap in Jefferson County schools

There are many gaps contributing to the poor performance of the Jefferson County Public Schools, including the well-publicized academic achievement gap between whites and minorities and the common-sense gaps which are unmistakable in the district's busing and student-assignment policies.

However, the most serious gap might be "the experience gap."
I write about it in today's Louisville Business First.

Dick Innes offers additional analysis of the JCPS teacher-experience gap in this recent blog entry.

Quote of the day: JCPS busing 'a colossal failure'

“The education here in Jefferson County Public Schools does not prepare large numbers of students to even graduate from high school, let alone get them ready for higher education.

"While I certainly don't blame it all on the school system, the system of busing students for 'diversity' has been and continues to be a colossal failure.

"Family members who want to be involved in their student's education and activities often cannot because of limitations and access to transportation between home, school and activity locations." --Mary L. Irwin, Letter to the Editor, (Louisville) Courier-Journal, May 24, 2011

FOX-41 shows videos of school bus violence in Jefferson County

We’ve written a lot about the crazy school busing situation in Jefferson County’s public school system. Kids are routinely uprooted from their neighborhoods and bused all the way across town in rides that can exceed an hour in length, one way.

With inadequate supervision, it was inevitable that problems would occur. The only surprising thing is how many problems are occurring, and how nothing very effective is being done to fix the situation.

The latest insight into the conditions on the school system’s buses came in a FOX-41 expose which ran on May 9, 2011.

Some interesting points:

• The school system has 930 buses, but only 40 security cameras.

• There are only 25 bus monitors. In all other cases, the bus driver is the only adult on board.
• The Transportation Director admits, “Every day we have a fight on a bus, or two buses, or three buses."

• Noses are getting broken; a kid’s hair is set on fire; kids are getting concussions; kids’ arms are getting broken.

• There are more than 100 pages of felony case filings for this school year alone.

• Jefferson County busing managers say they know only a few kids cause problems, but they do nothing effective to deal with those students.

The really sad thing is that if busing for integration worked, with 40 years of busing now history in Jefferson County, there wouldn’t be any more need for the long rides. Minorities would have moved up into the middle class by now, and into the more prosperous neighborhoods, as well.

Instead, after two decades of KERA, West End schools in Louisville continue to seriously under-perform. And, instead of focusing on academic improvement – and spending money to make that happen – the district’s school leaders are just throwing dollars away on thousands of gallons of diesel fuel for buses that probably contribute more to student anxiety and dislike of school than to good student development.

It’s time for good people in Louisville to start putting real pressure on their teachers union controlled school board to take action. No business on the plant would continue pushing a failed experiment for forty years, and it’s time for citizens to demand something better from their school leaders.

If you know more stories about problems in Jefferson County’s buses, we’d like to hear them. You can submit these anonymously with the comment feature in this blog.

Tea Party starting to get involved with local school board races

In an encouraging sign that citizens are starting to take more interest in their schools, Education Week reports (subscription?) that local Tea Parties are starting to get involved in local school board races.

This marks an important change in the conduct of school board races, which in the past have often been dominated by teachers’ unions and their money.

Here in Kentucky, for example, a recent Bluegrass Institute open records request for ‘Independent Expenditures’ on behalf of political candidates uncovered evidence of the Jefferson County Teachers Association and its political action group providing individual school board candidates with campaign support over $100,000. It is virtually impossible for independent school board candidates to match such financial competition.

Absent involvement of a strong, motivated group like the Tea Party, teachers’ union dollars generally give the unions a free hand in controlling the races and, ultimately, the operation of local school systems. That leads to excessively teacher friendly but child hostile contracts and other programs such as Jefferson County’s disastrous busing for integration program.

Now, as EdWeek reports, citizens are waking up to reality – a huge proportion of their tax dollars go to our under-performing education system, so if citizens want to get some relief from the incessant expansion of taxes, the schools are one of the first places to look.

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.

Coming to a state near you, Kentuckians: More choices for parents, chances for kids

While Congress was busy passing a bill that would restore the torpedoed D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program on Wednesday, a state closer to (my old Kentucky) home was also passing landmark education legislation dealing with school choice and spending.

Indiana's House of Representatives approved a voucher bill allowing students in a family of four with household incomes up to $62,022 to receive a voucher covering from 50 percent to 90 percent of a private school tuition.

Imagine how such an option could shake up, say, a district like Jefferson County, where 60 percent of students are from low-income homes.

No doubt, anti-choice forces would wail about how such a voucher plan would throw government schools into chaos. But have you taken a look at that district's student-assignment plan and busing disaster lately?

It appears chaos arrived long ago. We're still waiting on choice to get here.

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.

Violence was endemic on Jefferson Co. School bus before driver got assaulted

Facts are dribbling out in the school bus driver assault case I blogged about on March 4, 2011.

It turns out conditions on this bus are out of control far beyond anyone’s worst nightmares.

Fox41.com reports that this one bus “had about 150 incidents of fighting and other misconduct this school year alone.”

I’m beginning to understand the frustration of the parent who assaulted the bus driver.

Read more »

More evidence: busing in Louisville is out of control

Kids pepper sprayed during fight on bus

The results of a long winter and overly long, under-supervised school bus rides are beginning to take their toll on the busing for diversity madness in Louisville.

I mentioned one incident, triggered by bullying, a few days ago.

Now, for the second time since the beginning of March, violence has broken out on one of Jefferson County’s longer bus routes.

This time, 11 children wound up in the hospital with pepper spray burns after two girls took their dispute, which was apparently known to some adults at least several days before, to a new level.

WLKY.com has the details.

Read more »