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"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
Our state requires "safe walking routes". I'm not sure about the distance to a bus stop, but I know for walking to school it's up to a mile for elementary school, if there are sidewalks. Otherwise they're bussed.
Why should half a mile of walking be illegal for first graders? There's a solution to rain and snow: it's called a jacket and umbrella. Source: I walked almost exactly half a mile to school in first grade.
Unless the weather is catastrophically bad, even first graders can walk half a mile.
The issue here is the carcentric, children-killing infrastructure, not the distance.
All kidnappers loved this post.
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.
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…
From experience, there is nothing preventing you from leaving, except that anything you do has to be close enough to the bus lot and meticulously scheduled to allow for you to drive from the bus lot to where you need to be and back while also allowing any prep time, especially if you need to pretrip your bus.
In other words, in theory, you can do whatever you want. In practice, you're straight up tethered to that lot. I worked out my actual pay last year. I made $22/hrs working for a major national transportation service. My average paid time was about 6.5 hours. My layover time was two separate segments. I had 2.5 hours of driving in the AM, about 1.5 in the late AM, and another 2.5 in the PM. These were separate by 2 hours, and then 2.5 hours. So, the reality of this schedule meant that I couldn't do much of anything on my downtime. I was obligated to 11 hours, only 6.5 of which I was paid. So, the reality was that I was making $13/hr. That math convinced me not to return this year. That, and my shit benefits caused me to get a $1,400 lab bill for work that was only $45 on my previous insurance. They screw you. They screw you coming, they screw you going, and anything that goes wrong is always your fault, while they're quick to take credit when things go well.
It ain't worth it.
They REALLY lowballed the funding when some locations have a stop half mile away on top of being slow and inefficient due to lack of drivers and driver training.
Why even pay a firm for optimal route planning if you dont even have the personel to execute it.
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.
Something I haven't seen in the comments but is very important to the equation.... Louisville has a very messed up bussing situation and has for years.
I'm not SUPER aware of the details, but that's because I live on the southern Indiana side of the river (just miles away from Louisville). My wife moved over here years ago specifically to avoid this issue for her kid before he was in the school system.
Louisville has a long standing policy where there is some sort of lottery that chooses what school you go to, rather than your school being determined by your nearest available.
The idea was clearly based on good intentions... to ensure that kids from any neighborhood would have the same opportunities, etc etc.
However, in reality it is a nightmare. Louisville isn't the largest metro area or the most sprawling, but still, trying to bus students from every school to every part of the county is ridiculous.
I think they made some changes in the past few years to make it easier to get a closer school, but again I'm not super up to date on it because it doesn't affect me other than the bus routes being an issue every year and hearing about it on the local news.
It's gotten worse and worse over the years though.
Again, I'm sure there are much more informed people with better info on this out there, but until they jump in I figured I'd add some pertinent info since this isn't a local lemmy community.
They just need to spread the money out to all schools per capital, not spread the children out lmao.
Our education system is a huge joke.
OMG I'd be so pissed. Like, I'd weather just pick them up myself, or track the bus down and pull them off of it.
For a time, I lived an hour from my school. Caught the bus at about 530am, and got home at like 5ish. Very rural area in the Mojave desert. But this is just so bad.
Maybe they should buy a second bus. Or maybe even a third...
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.
It's unintentional in that they thought they could handle the number of kids needing to be bused, despite the fact that they were massively defunded and there weren't enough buses or trained drivers
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.
Because they have to do something to improve the situation. As long as that something is not pay the drivers enough that people would be willing to do the job. Because then the teachers would realize how fucked over they are getting and quit to be bus drivers which would only worsen the teacher shortage.
Yeah, the article says they increased pay and still weren't getting enough drivers. So... do it again. You've already know the knob you need to turn to resolve your problems, you just don't want to turn it any further. Especially not when you can throw money at what seems like corruption (incompetent consultants) instead.
My bus ride home from school was about an hour when I was in middle school. I thought that sucked, lol.