Jefferson County Public Schools made national news on the first day of school for all the wrong reasons. Its bus routes and service to its 90,000 students were a fiasco. Some kids spent nearly seven hours on the bus, and didn’t make it home until 10 pm. JCPS canceled classes for six days and began a staggered reopening. The Ky Center on Economic Policy blamed Republican state legislators for not providing enough funding. But JCPS made no such complaints about lack of funding before the incident. In fact, they paid over $250,000 to a Massachusetts Artificial Intelligence firm to develop these new bus routes. The problem wasn’t a lack of funding, it was a lack of planning on the part of JCPS administrators.
There’s a shortage of transportation workers all over the country because of the federal government’s DOT drug testing requirements. The DOT just approved switching from urine testing to oral fluids testing because Transportation companies all over the country have been screaming at them that they can’t find workers. A scheduling app can’t make up for too few drivers. I’ll be introducing an ordinance at the next Louisville Metro council meeting Thursday to mandate that all drug testing be immediately changed to oral fluids testing and send the urine test into the ash heap of History.