“Kentucky’s largest school system cancelled the second and third day of classes”
“…the bus for her two elementary school children was scheduled to pick them up at 6 a.m. for a 7:40 a.m. school start. The bus stop is almost a half-mile from their home and there are no sidewalks.”
The paragraph after that makes it even worse:
Gomis called the district’s transportation department but was told nothing could be changed, she said. Kentucky law allows bus stops for elementary students to be up to a half-mile away while middle and high school students may walk up to one mile.
It probably doesn’t hurt a high schooler to walk a mile (although it would suck ass in the winter), but a half-mile for a first grader every morning no matter the weather? That should not be legal.
I used to live closer than that to my elementary school and I was forbidden (by the school) from walking to school.
That kinda sucks, used to live like 900m from mine and walked back from school every day since I started it.
Didn’t walk to the school because I was too hard to get up early enough for it and mom didn’t mind dropping me off in the morning
That’s true for kids at my daughter’s middle school too, but I’m actually glad they don’t walk it because there aren’t even any sidewalks around the school, let alone between the schools and their houses. So some kids have a 90 minute bus ride and other kids have a 2 minute bus ride. All they have to do is build sidewalks and it will fix that problem.
A half-mile is nothing. WHY ARE THERE NO SIDEWALKS?
Sidewalks are for communists.
They have middlewalks instead
It’s ok, the mine is closer they can just go there
and there are no sidewalks.
This tells you this sentence is about a Kentucky city.
Not only Kentucky. I live in a rural California town of around 2000 people. There are no sidewalks except for the 1/4 mile in front of the elementary school, and that wasn’t built until a kid was hit by a car 6 years ago. Last year a 4th grader was killed by a drunk driver walking home from school on the main road through town - which has no sidewalk. Most of us drive our kids to and from school now, particularly since an attempted abduction happened earlier this year. Bus service is available, but costs $185 a year per child and requires being at the stop an hour before school starts. My daughter won’t let her kids walk the 1/4 mile to the bus stop unattended. Not in these times. I think the bus may become even more unpopular since the special ed driver was arrested last week for molesting kids.
There are no sidewalks in my (very large) subdivision, but all of the roads are far wider than necessary and could absolutely have a sidewalk on each side. But since there aren’t any, you have to dodge people walking and jogging all the time. And people speed down the twisty roads too.
This is how kids get taken
Even after increasing pay
Hmm, so what did they increase it to? Oh look only $20.65/hour., and I’ve heard of some school districts only paying during the driving meaning you show up for work early AM to pick up your bus as a driver and start being paid. You pick up and drop off kids for your routes. Now its maybe 9am. No more pay for you until you go back to the school and pick kids up again to take them home at maybe 2pm. I don’t know if this district does this, BTW.
$20.65/hour is way WAY too low for a job with lots of unpaid hours in the middle of the shift, and having to be responsible and deal with kids that can’t behave enough on a school bus.
Unless the bus company let me drive somewhere else since I’m not being paid then I’d be filing wage complaints with the state department of labor…
Better cut more funding for K-12! Some of these kids can still tell time!
The US has collapsed, most just aren’t willing to admit it to themselves.
JCPS is not suffering for funding. A big part of the issue is they used shitty software to plan a bus route. On top of it being notoriously hard for keeping drivers in the district.
Edit: but shit like this happens and the R’s that control the state are going to start calling for the funding to be slashed, because might as well, its already one of the worst in the state.
JCPS needs a massive overhaul. Something big needs to change.
“On top of it being notoriously hard for keeping drivers in the district.”
If you pay them, they will drive. If you raise them adequately regularly, they will stay.
Just like the national “teacher shortage” because we pay them dogshit relative to their education, tell them they’re spoiled and don’t even deserve dogshit, and then blame the few still showing up for poor outcomes. Then, when kids recognize that getting into teaching makes you a sucker, we cry tears of blood about classroom sizes as if we can’t trace back why.
We should take half the defense budget for 10 years and put it into rebuilding the utter ruin that is public K-12, in order of the states with the worst outcomes, if we want to even compete in the future. We of course won’t though. We’ll jist keep saying “if only there was something we could dooooooooo…”
Ooh I know, we should cut rich peoples taxes yet again, that’ll help this time for sure!
There are hundreds of administrators in this school district making six figures. The main administrator makes 300k+ if we didn’t have enough drivers these tax payer funded jerkoffs could’ve been out driving these buses and getting these kids home safely. JCPS likes to waste money year in and year out and every single year they do something embarrassing. This one was top tier embarrassing.
Maybe they should buy a second bus. Or maybe even a third…
I’m not familiar with your school background, but I suspect a watershed distinction is rural vs urban districts. I’ve had kids in both, and in rural districts, the buses are important, but not as vital for in-town kids as in the metro areas. I’n the rural districts as many kids were dropped off by car or public transit as took the school buses. In the metro areas, the bus might be required or effectively the only option.
It’s all speculation, but this isn’t Podunk Kentucky; this is Louisville. This is really something a metro of nearly a million people should have figured out by now. But easy to Monday morning quarterback, and I do sympathize with the funding constraints and public apathy.
You’re right and it’s on me for not reading the article to understand that this is Louisville so it does make for a much, much different experience than my region.
School system: “Kids… Fuck 'em!”
I really hope this is more “didn’t realize a mistake in the planning” and not “knew and expected 10 pm drop off”
Though when I was young I had to walk to the other side of my block to get a ride to school because my house was with in a half mile of school, the other corner wasn’t. That wasn’t a huge deal, but still stupid.
My bus ride home from school was about an hour when I was in middle school. I thought that sucked, lol.
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