LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Late Tuesday night, the Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) Board of Education agreed to hold off on making any potential changes to the 2024-25 transportation plan.
The vote was postponed until their meeting on April 16, 2024. Board members voted 6-1 to table that discussion.
Board Chair Dr. Corrie Shull made the motion to hold off on the vote, citing the damning information that came out in the audit released Monday that outlined what led to the first day of school transportation meltdown.
Tatia Prieto is the founder of the company that completed the audit. She addressed the board Tuesday to go over the report findings and answer questions from the board members.
The two main relevant conditions the audit claims fueled the fire that was the transportation debacle, are "little active management" and "poor communication systems." She said the information in the recent audit shouldn’t be a surprise, as it has been consistent with other audits done in the past.
"I do not agree that they would be divergent. Your 2023 audit form the Kentucky Department of Education explicitly says 'find ways to include transportation to a great degree in your school choice opportunities,'" Prieto said.
She and her team watched school board meetings dating back to 2018 to determine what went wrong.
"What we saw in the board meetings were uses of phrases like 'most complex transportation.' 'System in the nation.' So I thought, I work in transportation, maybe you are. But we concluded that we’ve seen more complex. We’ve seen more difficult. We’ve seen larger school districts with transportation issues. We’ve seen school districts that transport magnet students without perceived challenge," Prieto said.
In a statement sent to WHAS11 News, an AlphaRoute spokesperson said the audit "lacks critically important details and misses or misstates many facts about AlphaRoute’s engagement with the school district."
"The majority of the issues identified in the audit related to AlphaRoute were the result of direct guidance or approvals from JCPS staff or timelines imposed on the project by JCPS staff or procedures," they said. "AlphaRoute cooperated fully with this audit and is surprised and disappointed that we were not given an opportunity to provide context to some of the inaccurate claims contained in the report. The driver shortage that JCPS faced and is still navigating resulted in district leaders having to make difficult decisions on a short timeline. As we demonstrated in Louisville, AlphaRoute is committed to always supporting our clients, even beyond the scope of our contract when necessary.”
Around 20 students, teachers, and parents addressed the board ahead of the motion, expressing their opposition to Option 1. Many of them asked the board to hold off on a decision.
Superintendent Marty Pollio has recommended Option 1 ahead of the meeting, which would cut transportation for a majority of magnet and traditional school students in the district.
A recommendation that has gained vocal opposition since the options were first announced, including from Prieto.
"What if the district votes to end transportation to 16,000 magnet students and then later finds out you didn’t need to make that drastic of a cut," she said.
Essentially, it would only provide buses for students who attend their resides school, elementary school students who attend school in their cluster, special education students who have transportation in their IEP, McKinney Vento students and those who attend alternative or state agency schools.
The options are:
- Cut transportation for a majority of magnet and traditional school students.
- Create magnet and traditional school hubs, where parents are responsible for getting their students to school and home.
- No transportation changes at all.
- Maintain bus services at magnet and traditional schools, but only to those that meet a 70% threshold of economically disadvantaged students.
In a letter NAACP President Raoul Cunningham hand-delivered to JCPS at the Van Hoose Center on Wednesday, March 20, the organization said the first option would "...lead to further segregation of schools in West Louisville and deny opportunities for a high-quality education to Black, brown and poor students."
They also said if option one is selected, the NAACP would withdraw its support of the district's choice zone plan.
While JCPS, on the other hand, called that option the most equitable option with the least negative impact on students of color.
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