‘JCPS bus problems underreported, review shows’

The above is the headline in the Louisville Courier-Journal's recent article reporting on the latest developments in the school-busing mess in the Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS).

It's hard to determine the seriousness of problems if important data isn’t included in the records that supervisors use to evaluate them. Apparently, as C-J reporter Allison Ross discovered, a whole lot of JCPS bus-driver complaints never made it into the supervisors’ system.

JCPS as we've previously discussed is having so many problems with kids misbehaving on the buses that drivers don’t even want to cover some of the district’s bus routes. The district has come up short despite even offering bonuses to drivers who would take on these extra-challenging routes.

In any event, as we show in our new update report on the problems with achievement gaps in Jefferson County Schools, busing doesn’t seem to work all that well for minority students.

Maybe it's time for JCPS to finally drop busing – an idea that even the US Supreme Court figured out years ago just doesn’t work – thus saving some serious diesel by cutting down on rush hour traffic, which would expose kids to less danger, and then to use the millions of dollars saved to focus on getting Louisville's West End schools up to snuff.

Taking 70,000 kids out of an enrollment of about 100,000 and busing them all over the place twice a day does not equate to a better education for those students. In fact, it may very well be harming them.