LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- The Jefferson County Board of Education spoke for the first time Tuesday evening about the transportation issues on the first day for Jefferson County Public Schools last week.

The Aug. 15 meeting was held in person at the VanHoose Education Center. It was the first time some board members spoke publicly since the district's first day of school on Aug. 9. Many of them shared their disappointment and frustration with administration.

The first day was plagued with bus delays in the morning and the afternoon as the district had implemented new school start times and bus routes. Some students' buses never showed up that morning, and others didn't get dropped off from school that evening until almost 10 p.m.

JCPS decided to cancel classes for Thursday and Friday and later extended that closure to include Monday and Tuesday of this week. Monday, the district said schools would remain closed Wednesday and Thursday before implementing a "staggered" return.

Elementary and middle school students will go back to school Friday, Aug. 18, and all high school students will return Monday, Aug. 21.

JCPS Superintendent Marty Pollio said Monday that the weekend will allow the district to make any needed adjustments before bringing all students back.

During Tuesday's board meeting, Pollio shared a transportation update with the board, saying the bus issues "overshadowed" good things that did happen on the first day, such as brand new schools welcoming students for the first time.

He once again apologized to families and students "negatively impacted" by the transportation issues and extended apologies to staff, bus drivers and the board itself.

Pollio said he wanted to detail what went wrong on the first day, show how the district could have done better, and explain how the issues will be corrected — which he also spoke about during a news conference Monday evening. 

"We do face significant challenge with transportation," he said. "We have significant and growing challenges that don't seem to be getting on the better side like almost every district across America. But that doesn't excuse the fact that we could have done better and definitely should have done better on day one."

He said the district has stretched its transportation system "as absolutely thin as it can be" with routes and services provided to the JCPS community.

"What we failed to do was to change our systems of support and to ensure that buses and routes were always moving forward," Pollio said. "We failed to provide the supports to our bus drivers (that) they needed, we failed to provide the supports to our schools that they needed. When we are this thin, when it comes to our routes, we can't afford to have significant delays in the system."

The superintendent said challenges happened most with the district's youngest students, but students not being clear about their buses was a problem amongst all grades, k-12. He said adding in a new system increased all of the usual first day issues.

"Without us making substantial changes to our systems and supports, we should have predicted that this would have been the end result of what happened," he said. "And as a result, major delays occurred."

Pollio said the district had been operating under the same support systems and technology it had when there were over 900 bus routes. Now, he said, there are 550 routes the district covers while "providing more services to students and families with transportation than we ever have."

"It has stretched us enormously thin," he said. "And unless we change the way we do things and provide great services to all of our bus drivers, our schools and our families, and become extremely efficient, then we will continue (to) have (the) delays that we had."

Pollio said the district had been working for six days straight on short- and long-term solutions.

"We have to be honest with the community. With 550 routes, for a system that was built for 900 routes, we're going to continue to have challenges when we talk about efficiency of getting people home," he said. "But what we have to do much better is communicate with families and schools, make sure they know exactly where they are, and make sure we have absolute maximum efficiencies within our systems that we created to support our families."

He said the "definitive answer" to the district's problem will be hiring more bus drivers. He said the district has close to 600 bus drivers right now, but it has to find a way to hire more. He also emphasized the district's efforts to improve communication with families about buses, routes and delays, and efforts to make bus routes "much more efficient."

"We are going to have to find ways to get more bus drivers or we are going to have to make a decision, moving forward, that we do not provide the same services for students and families," he said. "That's going to be a difficult decision to make."

Chris Perkins, JCPS' Chief Operations officer, presented some of the district's mistakes from the first day. He said they had identified four areas of operational breakdowns, including inefficiencies with bus stop additions and its impact on routing adjustments, a lack of contingency plans for bus depots, an antiquated system and lack of good communication.

For inefficiencies with bus stop additions and routing, Perkins said the following mistakes were made:

  • Systems stretched too thin
  • High number of unresolved students without bus stops
  • Safe stop concerns (some subjective)
  • No implementation plan with AlphaRoute
  • Inaccurate route lengths caused by additional stops
  • Route finalization began later than in previous years
  • Bus drivers had complicated and lengthy routes with no navigation tools beyond having a left/right turn sheet
  • Daycare drop-off and proximity.

Perkins said the district's bus depots and its "antiquated" system led to a lack in good communication, and delays at the depots caused by late buses resulted in "systemic backups." He also cited outdated technology for communication and bus tracking.

When it comes to communication issues, Perkins cited a Command Center breakdown and lack of a cohesive plan, including insufficient capacity for radio communications, school and depot communication plans and family communication. Additionally, Perkins cited poor communication with bus drivers, a lack in capacity to track bus arrival and compound clearing times, and the bus call center not being sufficiently staffed.

Perkins said they have added staff to the call center and command center in an effort to provide better services. They're also working on adjusting routes.

Moving forward, Pollio said they're collaborating towards solutions, including temporary support and long-term fixes, with AlphaRoute, with T-Mobile for bus tracking to implement an app for parents and families to track buses, and collaboration with UPS to review routes, identify problematic routes and come up with possible solutions.

Pollio said the challenges weren't "about hard work," but were about not anticipating the problems he said "should have been anticipated" and "taken care of" over the summer.

"Nearly every one of these things we just told you about could have been and should have been anticipated, and they weren't," he said. "I take responsibility for not asking the tough questions and not being as involved in the oversight as I should have been, and obviously that has changed over the past week."

The superintendent also touched on the collaborations happening to create solutions. He said he thought AlphaRoute could have been "more partners with us through the implementation process," but that what the public saw on the first day of school was "all of our issues and not necessarily AlphaRoute." He said T-Mobile and Edulog are working on an app that will allow parents to know where their child's bus is at all times, and send them notifications when a bus is running late.

"Unfortunately, this is technology that most large districts in the nation have that we do not, which was very disappointing to me," Pollio said. "So that is being changed immediately."

Pollio said the hope was to have that technology "ready to go" by, "at a minimum," early next week although the district hoped to have it on the first day, Friday. But, he said, families will now be able to call their school on the first day and the school can tell them where their student's bus is.

"The one thing I'm going to say, we're going to continue to have a stretched-thin transportation system, but what we cannot have is a lack of communication, and we have to take responsibilities for that," he said.

Pollio said changes being made at the district's Command Center include tighter structures, logistics and role clarity with a clear communication plan between the center, schools and bus depots. There will also be increased help at the bus Call Center, support to double check office after-hours features on voicemail, and making sure someone is answering calls until all students are home. Pollio said he's been in touch with bus depots to determine which drivers need a "shoulder buddy" to help them navigate areas they may be unfamiliar with on their routes. He also said he'd met with bus drivers and plans to meet with them again Wednesday in an effort to increase feedback from drivers. He also plans to have those meetings regularly moving forward.

"Quite candidly, we should have taken the bus driver feedback when they first got their routes," he said. "Our bus drivers told us that the routes were too far, and too hard, and we said this, when we added stops we did not adjust the time, bus drivers, so we know that what happened was you were being asked to complete a route in impossible time. And so that will change, that's my commitment to our bus drivers."

Pollio said drivers were put in a "very unfair situation" last week. 

The district is also looking at bus stop quality control and data analysis to ensure safe and accurate stops for families, as well as tightening the communication system with bus depot leads and have backup transportation interventions. Pollio said buses need to wait at a bus depot until all buses arrive and children switch. If one or two buses are late, depots would go through with switching buses and have vans or other buses waiting to get other students home.

Pollio said there are plans to make changes to routes, including: 

  • Efficiency: Significant route improvement for time
  • Time reduction: Reducing lengthy routes
  • Daycare: Door-to-door routes updated
  • Special needs transportation: Information delivered to schools through ECE Department
  • Additional resources for short-term support: Buses, vans and fleet vehicles at bus depots and compounds

The superintendent said route updates are being worked on "right now" to minimize the routes with 25-30 stops that make it "nearly impossible for a bus driver to complete their route on time."

"Unfortunately, what that is going to require is a balance between providing stops that families want and also the buses we have," he said, adding that the district has contracted with Miller Transportation to provide 20 additional buses to the district starting Friday.

Pollio said he tried to communicate with the Command Center on the first day and couldn't get answers about when buses were at schools or depots. He said the district is adding a clearer system before students return on Friday.

As far as additional resources, Pollio said a fleet of buses, vans and other vehicles at bus depots and compounds will be available so if a parent is not at a stop waiting for their child, a fleet vehicle will be able to meet the bus to pick up that student, allowing the bus to continue its route while the child is taken back to school for pickup. The vehicles will also be available for students whose first language isn't English and may not understand where their stop is. 

Pollio said the district will also extend its bus tagging system to middle and high schools. The system has been in place for years at JCPS elementary schools, he said. Students get a tag on their bag at the beginning of the day telling them their bus number and bus stop. Middle and high school students will now get those tags.

"We found that a big problem was middle and high school students not knowing their bus stop, and or not knowing their address where they go, or not being able to communicate with families," he said.

Administrators are also looking at multilingual learner provisions and translation systems for clearer communication and tagging. 

As far as long-term solutions and goals, Pollio said the district's Internal Audit team will conduct its own analysis of current systems and leading causes and bring back its own report sometime in the fall.

Other long-term plans include significant technology improvements and the addition of updated technology for transportation. That includes getting GPS devices for drivers and giving kids key fob trackers to have while on the bus so parents know when they get on and off.

Pollio said there are specific requirements in Kentucky state law about GPS systems and "not having an active screen," all of which he said the district has to work through before the devices would be allowed on buses.

In Human Resources, Pollio said the effort to fix a bus driver shortage will continue. The district will also continue evaluating ridership. He said the district will "need to make tough decisions if problems continue."

Additionally, schools and the district will tighten internal systems of support and communication. 

"In every crisis there's opportunity, I believe that, and this was a huge challenge that caused a lot of angst and panic with our students and our parents and I clearly understand that," Pollio said. "Our opportunity here is to get much better at what we do. And we are going to do that." 

The board was then able to ask Pollio questions. Board member Joe Marshall read a prepared statement saying it's not the board's job to run the day-to-day operations

"It is not the job of this board to run the day-to-day operations of this school district. We get paid $150 per meeting to sit in these seats," Marshall said. "It is time to get our governance structure in order and start doing the job that we were elected to do, which is monitor student outcomes and quit meddling in the business of the admin plans. We are wasting time."

Marshall said many people in the community, himself included, lost trust in the administration after the first day of school.

"I was mad, confused, perplexed, upset, but the worst of all I'm disappointed. I'm disappointed that we didn't follow through on what this board was told was going to happen as we move forward," he said, in part. "You must know that trust takes communication, honesty, and transparency. And the first day of school, this team failed on all three of those levels. You had built a lot of trust with a lot of individuals with the bold changes you had pushed for, the new schools that were opened, and sadly, a majority of that is gone with a lot of our families, and that should hurt all of us."

Many people in the audience during Tuesday's meeting were in agreement with Marshall.

"We will fix this. We will turn this thing around," he said. "Our kids will have the best outcome they ever had any school year. We are declaring today we will never be sitting here like this again."

Board member Linda Duncan spoke after Marshall. She began by addressing the bus driver shortage, asking why people don't want to drive buses anymore. She said discipline on buses needs to be taken more seriously, and made a pledge to bus drivers that she expects that to happen.

"I expect us to support our discipline code and these drivers and take their referrals seriously," said Duncan. "Have our assistant principals work these referrals and provide the consequences that need to be provided. Riding a bus is a privilege, it is not a guarantee and the price of riding the bus is you follow the rules. You cannot ride these buses and abuse drivers and I will not stand for that."

Duncan put an emphasis on delays playing a major part in the transportation breakdown on the first day of school. She asked Pollio about traffic back-ups with car-riders at schools and how those can be improved. He said a contributor to that problem is a lack of crossing guards to direct traffic, slowing down traffic. But, he said, crossing guards can't be controlled by the district as it's a city function. Pollio said he has contacted the city about a lack of crossing guards.

Duncan also addressed reports she had received that some buses had elementary, middle and high school students on them at the same time, asking if that was planned or an accident.

Perkins said it was not part of the plan, and he'd like to know which buses that occurred on so it could be addressed. When he asked which buses, many people in the crowd responded "all of them."

Duncan asked Pollio if there was some type of incentive for veteran drivers to take the more challenging routes. Pollio said they get an additional hourly stipend for those routes if they take them.

Board member James Craig spoke after Duncan, and said his main concern was making sure everything was up and running smoothly on Friday, asking Pollio if there was anything the Board of Education could do to ensure students don't miss any more school. Pollio said there wasn't, but said it was "unfortunate" that there "have been attacks in any way on the board for this ... this is not something that I think a board can do, it is on us to do that." He said he may be bringing technology contracts "that cost significant amounts of money" to the board in the future for approval, but that didn't include the app being developed for parents to track buses.

Craig said board members are hearing the word "accountability" a lot from the community, and asked Pollio about the internal audit being launched. Craig asked that the auditor contact the board, and said he's anxious to see how the system works on Friday. He also said some ridership needs to be reduced in some form. 

"The only thing that I hear is band-aids, I don't hear that more drivers are coming through the door anytime soon," said Craig.

Board member Sarah McIntosh spoke after Craig. She started by congratulating and thanking drivers and staff who worked all day on the first day of school helping to get kids home. 

"Moving forward, I think we do want to hear more about the audit and what the Internal Accountability Plan is going to be, I think that's something that is being demanded of us," McIntosh said. "And so I want to be very clear that the next time we convene, I think we would probably all appreciate an update on what that part looks like."

McIntosh also encouraged management "of any level" to listen to their staff and take their concerns "very seriously."

"The boots on the ground usually have the greatest pulse of what's happening," she said. "So I do want to make sure that whatever operational changes are made, that we are empowering all of our employees to be contributors to the solutions."

McIntosh also asked Pollio about the school calendar. Pollio has said he would ask the board to forgive "as many days as possible." He suggested changing faculty-only days to normal school days, but said the difficulty is not knowing what the winter weather will be like. He also reminded the board that the district has 10 NTI (virtual learning) days it can use if needed for inclement weather.

Board member Chris Kolb was up next, saying he "wholeheartedly" endorsed Marshall's comments. He said that as board members they also have to ask themselves how they contributed to ensuring JCPS administration invested "the time and resources to adequately prepare for the momentous change that we were undertaking, which I think is change that was desperately needed and worthwhile."

Download PDF JCPS Transportation Update presentation 8-15-23

Kolb said he hopes the one of the many things the board learns moving forward is the importance of listening to employee feedback and giving it more consideration "than we seem to have given it in this case."

"It's also, it's a little difficult to hear that there was technology out there that we could have had that would have helped our bus drivers quite a bit that we didn't have," he said. "And I just hope that, I would expect that, we get that technology implemented as soon as we possibly can."

Kolb added that rebuilding trust will not come overnight, but is something that will have to be built every day going forward.

Board member Corrie Shull spoke after Kolb, suggesting an outside agency take over the audit of what went wrong on the first day. Shull said inside auditors tend to paint a more positive picture and the district needs to focus on rebuilding its trust.

"I think this community is requiring and demanding accountability, and as such I do think there are some things that we can do to help foster the rebuilding effort of trust," said Shull. 

Pollio said that while TARC is willing to help, with the support of Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg, it's difficult to plug into the system when TARC has shortages of its own.

Board President Diane Porter was the last member to speak, asking for a timeline on when work to prepare drivers and families began. Perkins said it started in late spring when enrollment projections and student assignments were finalized. 

Duncan echoed Shull's recommendation that an outside company handle the audit.

"Since 1975, when the two districts came together, to my knowledge, we have never had a student taken off the bus at 9:58 p.m. This is unacceptable," Duncan said. "And I am speaking on behalf of the District 1 because the child that was on the bus was in District 1. This is not safe for our children, it's not safe for our drivers. So I keep hearing us say 'we need to, we need to,' the question is lets get it going, and lets make it work. Our children deserve it, our families deserve it, and our bus drivers deserve it. Teachers, principals and everybody. This is unacceptable. And again, I've been around a mighty long time, and I know that in 1975 there was not a child that was let off the bus at 9:58 p.m." 

Duncan said what happened on the first day of school "cannot happen again," and said that some of the suggested solutions had been in place for years — such as tagging elementary students with bus information. She also echoed board members' statements about listening to feedback from employees on the ground.

"This is not over. We have got to have more information about when, why, how, and what will happen that it will never happen again. So I'm not just speaking to you, Mr. Perkins, Dr. Pollio. This is a group effort," said Duncan. "We have to be responsible for taking care of our children, our bus drivers, our families, our schools and our staff. It was disgusting."

You can watch Tuesday's full board meeting below:

To read more about the reopening plan Pollio talked about Monday evening, click here.

To look at the Transportation Update presentation, click here or on the PDF embedded in this story.

This story may be updated.

Related Stories:

Copyright 2023 WDRB Media. All Rights Reserved.