Kentucky school system closes after first day: ‘transportation disaster’
Louisville resident here.<p>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&#x27;m aware of at this point:<p>- 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.<p>- A bus driver &#x27;shortage&#x27; (I&#x27;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.<p>- 750 routes were reduced to 600.  I&#x27;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.<p>- Beyond the new routing, they also completely changed the school schedules to &#x27;stagger&#x27; 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.<p>- Kids were indeed kept on busses for hours, small ones soiling themselves, many hungry, some missing medication - etc.<p>- Teachers had to report in Thursday and Friday despite the kids being on a &#x27;snow-day&#x27; schedule. afaik they were called in to setup chromebooks.<p>- Only ONE school-board member voted against this plan. One.  The rest thought &quot;yeah seems good&quot;.