It’s the beginning of the school year, which means families across the country are wondering: Will the school bus get our kids to school on time? And in Louisville, Kentucky, the answer was a resounding no. The Jefferson County Public Schools actually had to cancel school for more than a week after a disastrous first day of classes on which some kids didn’t get picked up in the morning and some did not get home until nearly 10 PM.
Frantic parents drove from bus stop to bus stop, looking for their kids. Some even called the police. A sixth-grader told Louisville Public Media he had been left for 90 minutes on a bus with no air conditioning while waiting for a transfer to another bus. He was not allowed to get off even to go to the bathroom. Some children in the district were made to get off buses at the wrong stop, with no way for their parents to locate them.
Louisville isn’t the only district in the nation that’s had problems or is about to, but it’s certainly the most dramatic case—so far. And it’s a cautionary tale for districts that think they can overcome bus driver shortages with algorithms.
The Jefferson County Public Schools had hired a Boston-based company, AlphaRoute, to schedule its bus routes, paying $265,000 for the service. Last year, the school districts in Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio, both contracted with and then ditched AlphaRoute after encountering similar problems.
“AlphaRoute provided route analysis and made efficiency recommendations. CPS was not satisfied with the results and had to reroute and physically evaluate each stop,” the Cincinnati schools told the Associated Press in a statement.
Once again, the promise of sophisticated technology coming from the smartest people (AlphaRoute loudly touts its links to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) fails to deliver. “The underlying principle here is that people were wooed by something that seemed sophisticated, and they trusted that AI would be a magic fix,” Aaron Schecter, a professor of information management systems at the University of Georgia, told the AP.
But one reason districts are turning to the promise of technology is that school bus driver shortages are a problem nationwide. Hillsborough County Public Schools, the Florida district that includes Tampa, is short 203 bus drivers, leading to delays in the first days of school. In Charlottesville, Virginia, 1,000 kids who need buses are on their own.
In El Paso, Texas, some buses were delayed up to two hours as the school year kicked off. In the Hampton Roads region of Virginia, districts are offering signing bonuses to help attract the drivers they need. Roanoke, Virginia, is staggering school start times after two-hour delays in some cases last year. Chicago is providing free transit cards for students and adult companions in the face of a bus shortage.
Why the bus driver shortages? Look at this job: It involves driving a very large vehicle—requiring a commercial drivers license—filled with kids who may or may not be behaving at any given moment. Stressful would be a good word to describe that. On top of that, it’s a part-time job. Because it’s a few hours in the morning and a few in the afternoon, it’s not compatible with most other part-time jobs. And in many areas, the pay is terrible. Competition for drivers is also growing. The executive director of the National Association for Pupil Transportation blames the “Amazon effect,” telling EdWeek, “Amazon pays more than most school districts do. If a driver can get more hours and better benefits, that is appealing to them.”
It sounds like rather than spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on MIT types to design their bus routes, more school districts should be spending that money on competitive pay for their drivers.
American political parties might often seem stuck in their ways, but they can and in fact do change positions often. Joining us on this week’s episode of “The Downballot” is political scientist David Karol, who tells us how and why both the Democratic and Republican parties have adjusted their views on a wide range of issues over the years. Karol offers three different models for how these transformations happen—and explains why voters often stick with their parties even after these shifts. He concludes by offering tips to activists seeking to push their parties when they’re not changing fast enough.
