LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Jefferson County Public Schools responded to recommendations made by an audit that blamed the district and bus route service for the transportation disaster at the beginning of the school year.

Consulting firm Prismatic Services conducted the audit into JCPS by the board's request.

It put the blame on JCPS and AlphaRoute for the transportation nightmare at the beginning of the school year.

Some students didn't get home until nearly 10 p.m.

"I have no problem with audits whatsoever because I believe you can improve practice by having audits," JCPS Superintendent Dr. Marty Pollio said.

"There was one small one we disagreed with in our finance department, but every other thing that really had to do with transportation we agreed with," he said.

That was to establish a specific contract administrator or manager.

Pollio said he believes the district already complies with this recommendation because every contract is discussed with the board before approval and has someone overseeing the contract.

He said he'll still make sure it is being done consistently.

"I think from the very beginning of this we took a lot of responsibility, if not full responsibility, for the challenges that we faced," Pollio said.

Some of the things he agreed with are assigning students to schools if families don't fill out a school choice application and looking at moving all high school start times to 9:40 a.m. A change in start times at some schools were approved earlier this month.

"A lot of the things that were recommended we had already identified as issues and began to work on those, but I think there were some good recommendations in the audit as well," Pollio said.

He also agrees with communicating bus route plans more effectively by holding a weekly transportation status meeting with the routing team and only having members of that team be allowed to add stops to avoid bus overload.

"I learned a lot throughout this process of the things we were doing well in transportation and quite frankly the things we weren't doing well," Pollio said.

There were several additional comments from the auditor saying one district they knew of figured out how much bus drivers were making in surrounding counties and offered more money.

Pollio said JCPS has been doing that for years and starting salaries between $22.87/hr. and $35.78/hr. are significantly more than nearby districts and even comparable to companies like Amazon or FedEx.

"I thought there was some oversimplification of the challenges that we face and how to fix those but as far as the audit itself, we agreed with nearly every recommendation," Pollio said.

Another comment said they saw buses with only 20 students.

Pollio called that comment "damaging to the overall understanding of our transportation system."

The district also set up this webpage for new information about next school year.

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