Kentucky county forced to cancel school for four days after failure of new bus routing based on software from company whose CEO once oversaw bus transportation at BPS

By adamg on Sun, 08/13/2023 - 12:33pm

Jefferson County, KY - which includes the city of Louisville - had to cancel school Thursday and Friday and is canceling it again Monday and Tuesday, because of the failure of a new bus routing system based in large part on software from a Waltham company.

Associated Press reports school officials are not blaming the software from AlphaRoute of Waltham, whose founder is an MIT professor and whose CEO, John Hanlon, was formerly COO at Boston Public Schools, but rather the way they implemented the new routes.

AP interviewed one Jefferson County father who had to drive two of his kids to school because their morning bus never came - and then had to wait until 9:15 p.m. for his younger daughter to get home, soaked in her own urine, because afternoon buses were delayed for hours and she was forced to sit in a school hallway and not allowed to use a restroom the whole time.

The district serves 96,000 students over 380 square miles, compared to BPS's 54,000 students over roughly 48 square miles.

Neighborhoods:

Waltham

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Comments

Those poor kids

By BostonDog on Sun, 08/13/2023 - 3:07pm.

Going to school in early August. Starting before labor day is shameful. (According to myself when I was k-12 student.)

Different regions of the

By Rob on Sun, 08/13/2023 - 7:34pm.

Different regions of the country, different routines for school calendar (based on different climates), but many partly carried over from slightly-obsolete agricultural lifestyle family labor practices.

Year Round School

By cybah on Mon, 08/14/2023 - 9:45am.

Outside of New England, many school districts have moved to a year round school calendar. No more 'summers off'. You just get longer breaks around the holidays, and more single days off.

When I went to school in California in the early 90s, I was in the "C" Track, which was similar to the standard calendar us new englanders know. They started 1st or 2nd week in August. Then had Thanksgiving thru New Year's Off.

So yeah this tracks if its a year round school district.

Uh....

By Kaz on Sun, 08/13/2023 - 7:02pm.

then had to wait until 9:15 p.m. for his younger daughter to get home, soaked in her own urine, because afternoon buses were delayed for hours and she was forced to sit in a school hallway and not allowed to use a restroom the whole time

That has to fall under some sort of crime statute, right?

Yeah

By Snoofy on Sun, 08/13/2023 - 9:23pm.

This is a failure by the school, not the bus company. Or at least, the school had the kid in hand and completely failed to act as responsible, empathetic humans.

The School to Prison Pipeline

By SwirlyGrrl on Sun, 08/13/2023 - 9:47pm.

https://www.learningforjustice.org/magazine/spring-2013/the-school-to-pr...

Two things

By Ari O on Mon, 08/14/2023 - 10:55am.

The district serves 96,000 students over 380 square miles, compared to BPS's 54,000 students over roughly 89 square miles.

a) Adam, Boston is 89 square miles but nearly half of that is water so really it's only about 48 miles of land. Not much in the way of ocean in Louisville. To be fair, it's probably faster to drive across Jefferson County at rush hour than Boston. (And, yes, 380 sqmi is the land area for JeffCo.)

b) My cousins were visiting from Louisville and this was a topic of conversation. My cousin runs an after-school program and had to completely change things when school was canceled at the last second. Sounds like a real mess. Too bad no one learned that having MIT replace your school buses with Big Data that ignores little people is not a great idea.