JCPS students get shortchanged again: Plenty of money for a bloated forced busing scheme but not enough dough for textbooks

Here’s another grim story that Jefferson County Public Schools and the board of education don’t want you to know:  There is a severe shortage of textbooks.

How bad is the shortage?  Well, I’m not talking about a handful of kids in each class who have to work out a schedule to share a social studies or math textbook with a reading buddy.  There is such a severe shortage of textbooks at three middle schools that students are not allowed to bring their books home for subjects like social studies, math and science.  Highland, Myers and Frost are just a few of the schools.

No sharing.

No schedule to take books home and return them the next day.

No take-home books, period.  End of story.

Take a quick peak at the tab that lists the failing schools in Jefferson County and you’ll see…. Highland, Myers and Frost are on the list.  Surprise!

If you enjoyed school you probably remember reading your school books at home on your bed, studying ahead a little and, here’s a big one, ACTUALLY TAKING A BOOK HOME TO STUDY FOR AN UPCOMING TEST.

At one of those schools the kids aren’t allowed to bring home social studies OR math textbooks.  There just aren’t enough books to go around.  How few of them are there, you ask?  Well, there are enough books for ONE class – that’s about 30 kids.  So, one teacher has 30 books to share with four or five periods of instruction.  120 to 150 kids are sharing that set of 30 books.  Books are purchased about once every five or six years, by the way.

You can’t have a “sharing” schedule with four or five periods.  Think about that one.  If 1st period takes the books then 2nd through 5th are without a text book during instructional time.  If the last period takes the books, then the 1st through 4th period won’t have books.  What a mess.

Is it any wonder that these kids aren’t knocking it out of the park on standardized tests?  Their only resources to study at home are their hastily-written notes and maybe a worksheet or two. They get the luxury of studying a worksheet IF the teacher has the money to purchase copier paper – because most schools don’t foot the bill for that anymore either.  The claim is that teachers were wasting too much money on copies.

Stunning, isn’t it?

This isn’t really news, though.  Most of the schools revoked access to free copier paper several years ago.  Teachers have to pay for it or request donations from parents. So much for the teachers union insuring that teachers have access to the supplies they need. There is the occasional principal who realizes this is a really stupid way to save money so a few of them are using discretionary funds to provide copier paper to their faculty and staff.  Don’t get your hopes up.  There aren’t many of them out there.

I’m sure most of the principals are like mine – she’d rather squander money on catered meals for her staff from Stevens and Stevens than on copier paper.  For the record, Sheldon Berman graced our school with his presence for a Stevens and Stevens-catered event.  Surprised?

Back to this aggravating textbook situation.

Ask your friends who have kids at Collegiate, St. Agnes, Walden or KCD if their kids have a textbook for every subject.   You already know the answer.  Before you Google the tuition at those schools, keep in mind that the cost of educating a JCPS student works out to $10,000 per kid.  The costs are pretty comparable.

JCPS has a $1 billion budget and a fleet of 1200 school buses.  JCPS students have social studies and math scores that are among the worst in the state.  Many middle school students (and I’m guessing high school students, too) aren’t allowed to take social studies,science and math textbooks home.

What’s wrong with this picture?

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How Jefferson County Public Schools’ forced busing scheme robs elementary and middle school kids of desperately-needed instructional time

Here’s an interesting factoid from a 2010 issue of JCPS Parent Connection:

JCPS maintains a fleet of 1,200 buses to transport students who live more than a mile from school—more than 63,500 students every day.

We already know that Jefferson County Public Schools’ bloated transportation system siphons big dollars from our kids’ education even though the board of education and paper-pushers at Van Hoose Palace insist they really aren’t spending that much on transportation.

Feh.

District-wide forced busing isn’t just stealing money from our kids’ education.

Forced busing is stealing enormous chunks of instructional time from our kids, too.

The Jefferson County Board of Education knows it, the Van Hoose goons know it.  You probably don’t know about it.

Yet.

Here is what’s going on with thousands of kids across the district:  Everyday, plenty of buses deliver kids to their school late.  Big surprise, I know.  These are usually kids who receive free and reduced-fee lunch so they don’t proceed directly to class, they are served breakfast before going to their classrooms.  If the bus arrives ten or fifteen minutes after the bell (7:40 a.m. for middle and high schools, 9:05 a.m. for elementary), tack on another fifteen minutes so they can eat breakfast.  And I want these kids to have breakfast because it is the most important meal of the day.  I mean that.

I’m not knocking breakfast for these kids at all.

It’s usually the same bunch of buses that roll in late, the same kids who are missing out on class time.  What to do, what to do?  Neighborhood schools would handily take care of this messy problem but that solution is too easy.

Don’t worry!  JCPS cooked up a scheme so that every child in elementary and middle school pays a price for those late buses.  It’s called CARE for Kids and Circle of Power and Respect.  Before these programs were implemented, the kids who arrived late were the only ones who missed instructional time.  They rolled into class when the teacher was already in the middle of a math or reading lesson.  Well, now, that isn’t fair, is it?  Why should the bused kids be the only ones who miss out on a reading lesson?

So, in keeping with the overarching theme at JCPS that diversity/forced busing is more important than a solid education, our kids in elementary and middle school get to squander the first thirty to forty minutes of class time as a quasi-waiting period for those busloads of tired and tardy kids.

In elementary school, the kids take part in CARE for Kids.  That’s the tidy little social program brought to us by none other than JCPS superintendent Sheldon Berman that is really nothing more than a bunch of boogery kids sitting around a circle and sharing fascinating tidbits with their classmates like, “I went to Disney World for spring break”, “My favorite food is chicken nuggets” or “My cat had kittens last night and we named one of them Pork Chop.”  That last comment would be considered an “emergency share” because of the student’s urgency to share the  message with his or her classmates.

Yes, friends, it takes a doctorate from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education to create a program that the rest of us eggheads call friendly conversation.

There’s more!

In most middle schools, students on late buses used to shuffle into the cafeteria to wait until second period because the arrival of so many late students rolling into a class during first period was disruptive to the other students’ instructional time.  That doesn’t sound fair!  How can JCPS squander instructional time in a way that is more equitable?  Well, they found a way to guarantee that EVERYONE in middle school misses instructional time – just like the kids in elementary school.

Most of the middle school kids now participate in a component of CARE for Kids called CPR.  Circle of Power and Respect.  This is not a joke.  CPR, like CARE, serves as a quasi-waiting period for the middle school kids who arrive late and it forces every kid in the school to lose thirty minutes of instructional time.  Do the math.  2.5 hours lost every week.  10 hours a month.  Close to 60 hours per school year.  That’s about ten days of school.

By the way, ten days is JCPS’ threshold for absences which kicks off a mailing frenzy of letters and warnings to inform you that your kid missed ten days or is about to miss ten days.  Bad parent!  Bad!  Yet, JCPS is perfectly fine with squandering the equivalent of ten instructional days.

That’s a whole lot of time wasted on a programs that are in place to accommodate late buses.

That’s a whole lot of time that could be better spent educating tens of thousands of JCPS students.

Neighborhood schools, anyone?

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Read the entire document by clicking here.

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View the entire CARE for Kids booklet by clicking here or on the screenshot above.

Posted March 22, 2011 at 6:00 a.m.

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So, ya think Louisville is home to just 6 of the 10 worst schools in Kentucky? Well, think again! The cringeworthy truth is that we’re home to 9 of the 10 worst schools.

Remember when the media reported that Jefferson County Public Schools had six of the ten worst schools in Kentucky?  Well, in case you  forgot about that newsworthy gem, take a quick peak at WAVE-3’s story State Audit: Principals of lowest performing schools should be replaced.

The six schools that really stunk up the place are Frost Middle, Western Middle, Fern Creek High, Shawnee High, Western High and Valley High Schools.  You can view their rankings in a previous post (e.g., Shawnee was dead last in the state; less than 5% of the graduates were proficient in math) or you can take a look at schooldigger.com to see the depressing rankings with your own eyeballs.

JCPS has three failing schools that everyone failed to notice: Buechel Metropolitan High School, Breckinridge Metropolitan High School and Kennedy Metropolitan Middle School.

These three schools house the worst of JCPS’s worst students.  These are the kids who aspire to dress like prison inmates, who have no desire to speak articulately and who give their teachers all of the respect of a wet dishrag.  However, as I’ve said about a thousand times, students who deliver poor academic performance are a literal goldmine of federal and state revenue for JCPS.  May as well put them someplace and let the dollars roll in.

Here are some blurbs about each school from their websites that will make you want to hug your kids and bake them a big mess of chocolate cupcakes with sprinkles – unless, of course, they’re one of the little heathens populating these holding pens:

Buechel Metropolitan High School – 1960 Bashford Manor Lane

Buechel Metropolitan High School is part of the Jefferson County Public School District and is located in southeastern Jefferson County in Louisville, Kentucky. …In the beginning, there was a need for an alternative program for students who were exhibiting disruptive or misguided behavior in the schools. These students were separated from the school population and placed in a special program.

Students that attend Buechel Metropolitan High School are referred by the office of Student Services, juvenile court, or state and county agencies. Students who attend Buechel gain experience through varied learning modalities and through modeling appropriate behavior.

Kennedy Metropolitan Middle School – 4515 Taylorsville Road

Alex R. Kennedy Metropolitan Middle School is an alternative school for the Jefferson County Public School system. The school specializes in dealing with middle school students that have demonstrated behavioral problems at their home school. The students are referred by Pupil Personnel, Juvenile Court, or state and county agencies. …Students also learn that inappropriate behavior has consequences. Students learn through proper role models and varied learning techniques to heighten their behavioral and educational skills.

Breckinridge Metropolitan High School – 1128 E. Broadway

The Youth Program is designed to provide an appropriate transition for those students who are returning from juvenile residential facilities, who have had involvement in Juvenile Court, and/or long-term placement in Louisville Metropolitan Youth Detention Center (LMYDC). This program provides educational and behavioral support services that typically are not available in the regular schools and assist those students who demonstrate readiness for transition into regular school placement.

These schools generate no KCCT scores probably because the schools’ populations are transient but the more likely explanation is that these schools are academic wastelands – why bother with testing?  With the addition of these three schools to JCPS’s previous total of six failing schools, our new grand total is ramped up to NINE OF THE TEN WORST SCHOOLS IN THE STATE!

Wasn’t forced busing supposed to place these kids around the positive influence of middle-class suburban kids?  It sure does look like forced busing failed to deliver the goods on yet another objective.

What a disaster.

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JCPS superintendent Sheldon Berman and your Board of Education eliminated the Director of Math and the Director of Science to make way for THREE(!) pricey and cheesy administrative jobs. Unbelievable!

Gee, I thought it really stunk when the principal of my kids’ school used school funds to pay for a catered luncheon from Stevens and Stevens the same year parents were asked to purchase seven books for their kids because the school district didn’t have the dough.

Anyway, after I read the Jefferson County Board of Education meeting minutes for December 10, 2010, I realized I really need to stop with the pity party.

Here’s the link to all of the craptastic details: Board minutes for 12/10/10.

I made it to page six and had to stop reading.  There sure was a lot of money being thrown around.

Executive Director JCPS Gheens Academy Instructional Leadership/Student Assignment was eliminated and turned into TWO six-figure jobs!  One of the new six-figure jobs is Executive Director JCPS Gheens Academy for Curricular Excellence and Instructional Leadership.  Go back and re-read that.  Looks like the same job title but they’re different.

The second, new six-figure job throws more money at forced busing, it’s a student assignment position called Executive Director of Student Assignment, Health and Safety.  The Director of Math and Director of Science positions were eliminated to cover the costs of the new positions.  They are getting rid of three positions and adding two with no savings to the district.  It is, as Eckels or Berman insist in the minutes, “a wash.” 

Update:  On 12/10/10, the Jefferson County Board of Education also approved a new position called Coordinator SIG School Assessment.  SIG = School Improvement Grants.  This position is needed to handle the mountain of paperwork that will be generated by all of the failing schools.  Paperwork is more important than science and math, ya know.

Okay.

Here’s some funny stuff from the Gheens website:

You’ve Arrived!

Welcome to JCPS Analytical and Applied Sciences

Striving to strengthen mathematics and science instruction by deepening the implementation of the K-12 math and science curricula. This website will include both District and outside resources to support math and science learning.

**eyeroll** Who wrote that?  Mojo Jojo?

Well, I guess JCPS may as well give the Director of Science and Director of Math positions the heave-ho since students don’t really need help with math and science.  Right now, they need miracles.

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Kentucky Senate paves the way (AGAIN) for neighborhood schools as a legal right in Jefferson County. JCPS superintendent Berman’s response is “Blah blah blah wah wah wah,” or what we JCPS parents call “The Usual Response.

KY Senator Dan Seum (R) who supports neighborhood schools.

KY Senate President David Williams(R) who supports neighborhood schools.

Wow!  Who would have ever guessed that a bunch of Senate Republicans from small towns would have to step in and fix this mess in Louisville, richest city in the state with the worst schools?  Gasp!  I need to stop being so elitist!  Those Republicans passed Senate Bill 3 that will pave the way to make neighborhood schools and charter schools the law of the Commonwealth.

Unfortunately, not a single, thoughtful Dem voted for the bill because, you know, you get branded as a racist because you don’t want five-year-olds on a bus for 2 to 3 hours a day.

If you want the details, here’s the link to Elizabeth Donatelli’s report on WAVE3: Neighborhood schools bill passes Kentucky Senate.

Guess what?  Outgoing JCPS superintendent Sheldon Berman doesn’t like charter schools or neighborhood schools!  Big surprise!  He does, however, really, really like hiring his Massachusetts friends for six-figure jobs at JCPS’s VanHoose Palace and selling JCPS a bill of goods with Virtual High School contracts that handsomely benefit even more of his Massachusetts buddies.   Read more here at thevillevoice.com: Sheldon Berman Has Major Explaining To Do. Listen up, I’m so glad he’s history, I almost can’t stand it.  After reading the December 16th,2010, Sports Illustrated article about Max Gilpin, I am breathing fire and trying really hard to hold back on the incendiary posts.

Tidbit: Kentucky lost out on a chunk of that $4billion in 2010 Race to the Top money from the feds because WE DIDN’T SUPPORT CHARTER SCHOOLS.  Thanks, Berman and the teachers’ union!  Funding for Race to the Top has been significantly reduced for 2011 so we won’t have access to that kind of funding anytime soon.  We pretty much blew it.

Back to SB3.  Don’t get too excited.  The bill still has to make it through the House which is dominated by Dems: 58 Dems, 42 Republicans.  Here’s the link to the KY Legislature site, in case you’re interested: Kentucky Legislature.

Ky state senator Seum (R) said, “Jefferson County schools have gotten very good at transporting but not at educating.”

He added, “We have a school system that’s falling apart.  It’s not good.  It ain’t in the top fifty no more.”  That, friends, is called comic gold but I’m not touching it because I LIKE HIS STYLE.

Seum also said, “You wonder how can they be involved in their child’s education; how can they be involved in the PTA, if the school is way way down the road.”

Amen, Senator Seum.

“I want them to have the choice to go anywhere else that they want to,” said Williams.

Did you catch that?  He’s saying choice is good.  You want to attend a traditional program?  Fine.  But if JCPS wants to truck your young ‘un 20 miles across town just so White Student can sit next to Black Student while reading and math scores keep tanking, uh, not so good.

Williams also said, “Twelve out of the 20 persistently low-achieving schools in Kentucky are in the Jefferson County school system.“

Meanwhile, Berman is all over the media with his comments, like this: “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, the sky is falling, blah, blah, blah.”

And he insisted that, “Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, blah, blah, blah.”

OMG!  HIS LIPS ARE MOVING BUT HE’S NOT SAYING ANYTHING!!

Or maybe we all just stopped listening to his nonsense.

Outgoing JCPS Superintendent Sheldon Berman complaining about charter schools and neighborhood schools.

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Dig out your Lucite heels and Miu Miu mini-dress. Somebody is so freaking mad about Greg Fischer flip-flopping on JCPS’s student assignment plan that he made a video and set it to techno trance. Dance party!

Somebody out there is more burned up than I am  about Louisville mayor-elect Greg Fischer copycatting Hal Heiner.

The audio isn’t so great in the video but this is what’s happening:

* Fischer vows to crucify the conservative agenda that will place people on the Board of Education who will try to get rid of student assignment/forced busing.

*Cut to Greg Fischer dismissing what Greg Fischer said earlier.  In the second scene, Fischer blows smoke up our hineys to tell us that JCPS’s student assignment needs to be fixed and, by God, he’s going to make it happen.

Yes, that pretty much sums it up about Fischer.  He’s like the mayor on The Nightmare Before Christmas.  Totally two-faced.

Note to Fischer and every other person who doesn’t get it:  It is not a conservative agenda that wants to get rid of students assignment/forced busing, it’s a PRO-EDUCATION agenda that wants neighborhood schools.

Here’s the video from Curtis Morrison’s blog, Louisville Courant, at www.louisvillecourant.blogspot.com.  Love it, love it.

No, Beevis and Butthead did not write the abbreviated header on the video.

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Damn. It. WLKY cut John Boel loose. He was the first bigshot in local media to put the microscope on forced busing in Louisville but he won’t be the last.

Okay, it’s official.

WLKY gave John Boel the boot on November, 11th for his DUI arrest in Shepherdsville.  He also had an open container in his car.  Ugh!  I’m not going to comment on the drunk driving stuff but he sure is a great reporter.

Even though John isn’t at WLKY anymore, his report on forced busing will live on.  You’ll be surprised at how much well-researched information he crams into a brief report that was intended to be part of a series:  WLKY Investigates: Busing Beginnings, Future.

Here are the highlights:

* Shots of riots in Louisville in the 70s
* Angry white people, angry black people
* Fast-forward to the mid-90s when neighborhood parents took back Central High School
* Minority enrollment went sky-high
* Graduation rates and accountability scores have increased
* Neighborhood school with black kids does just fine!

Great stuff.  No demagoguing from Boel.

And – oops! So much for the paternalistic belief that black kids are too dumb to learn anything in their own neighborhoods.  Looks like the neighborhood parents have more sense than the so-called education experts at Van Hoose.

The next part of the series intended to ask these questions:

When it comes to busing does desegregation improve educational achievement? Would going back to neighborhood schools have an adverse effect on test scores?

We know the answers.  No and no, as long as JCPS stops diverting Title I money away from actual low-performing schools.

Boel’s series is essentially DOA but someone else in local media will tell the rest of this billion-dollar story.  It won’t be the Crapola-Journal, that’s for sure.

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If Superintendent Sheldon Berman really thinks diversity is such a great idea, why do white guys have the high-roller jobs at JCPS? And why did two black, female principals take the heat for a bungled transportation system supervised by a white guy?

Arthur Camins, Executive Director of Gheens Institute and friend of Berman.  $140,567/yr. Not really sure what he does. White guy.

Paul Graseck. Director of Cultural Studies and friend of Berman. $130,591. Oversees social studies curriculum among other things. Social studies scores were so bad for 2009-10 that it deserved a mention in virtually every local news report on KCCT scores. White guy.

Robert Rodosky, Executive Director of Accountability – Research and Planning, $151,276/yr. Proclaims that the test caused poor test scores even though less prosperous districts performed better than JCPS. White guy.

Michael Mulheirn, Executive Director of Facilities and Transportation. $146,857/yr. Supervises the annual first-week-of-school bus mayhem; it’s easy to Google articles for five years of mind-blowing stories about busing chaos/lost kids/four-hour bus rides on the first day of school so have fun looking those up. White guy.

Anyway, we’ve all heard Berman give his song-and-dance about his commitment to putting kids on buses for three hours a day diversity.

Talk’s cheap.

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Let’s rehash the chaos of the first day of school.

Two principals at Lincoln Elementary and King Elementary were suspended because they either didn’t print out the bus information for a bunch of kids’ lanyards or they failed to jump through some other bureaucratic hoop JCPS’s transportation goons created for them for the first day of school.

Come on, these principals weren’t busy enough trying to prepare for the first day of school for about 500 kids?  These schools are among some of  lowest-performing schools in the entire state and they don’t have access to an army of volunteers that you find at schools like St. Matthews Elementary or Audubon Traditional.  Schools have a critical need for volunteers on the first and second days of school to make things go smoothly.  King and Lincoln didn’t have that luxury.

View Adam Walser’s story here at whas.com:  Two principals suspended after transportation mix-up on first day of school.

Here’s what the news report didn’t tell you about King and Lincoln:

First, take a look at the map of the Elementary Schools Clusters which is on page 4 of Berman’s manifesto called No Retreat: The JCPS Commitment to School Integration.  Look at the distance those kids have to travel!  King Elementary is in a cluster that spans from the western-most border of Jefferson County to the Jefferson-Oldham county line.  Where is King located in this cluster?  Close to the western-most border of the cluster – not in a centralized location.

Second, look at the 16-page bus schedule for King (!) which is more complicated than the TARC schedule for the entire county.  Lincoln has a 13-page bus schedule.  Chancey Elementary  has a teeny-tiny 3-page bus schedule and had loads of PTA volunteers but still managed to hose up the first day so badly that they received a mention on the evening news.  Kind of a testament to how complicated this money-sucking student assignment plan really is.

By the way, Chancey’s principal, in charge of a school in the prosperous East End of Louisville, didn’t get called on the carpet for busing problems – even though there were plenty according to the evening newscasts.

Some of King’s and Lincoln’s students must transfer to a second and, sometimes, a third bus at depots.  A Story Chatter on the C-J said her kindergartner has to transfer twice.  Wow.   A group of King students did not get home until 9:30 p.m.  and Berman apologized for this “inconvenience” in the press conference – it’s in the WHAS video.  I love it when a mom yells out, “It’s more than an inconvenience!” while Berman just rifles his papers and keeps that smile plastered on his face.

Shelley, an inconvenience is when you misplace your car keys.  Losing someone’s kid for almost six hours is a super-freak-out crisis.  Over 200 kids didn’t get home until 9 p.m. or later that day.  That’s really pathetic and someone in charge should have been canned, pronto.  And I’m not talking about a principal.

These JCPS principals didn’t have anything to do with the creation of the new cluster or the epic bus schedule.  They didn’t have the volunteers they needed.  They had to deal with the first day of school which is incredibly hectic at any school.

So, guess who took the heat over a transportation fiasco for a schools with 13 to 16-page bus schedule, bus changes at depots and a 20 to 25–mile commutes?  Was it the white guy parked behind a desk who supervised the creation and implementation of the new busing plan that treats our children like luggage?  Or was it a couple of black women who each supervise the education of about 500 children?

You already know.

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No-show Tobo: Did he miss last night’s District 3 Board of Education Candidate Forum for a legitimate reason or was he totally blowing off his constituency?

I have no idea why JCTA-endorsed District 3 candidate David Toborowsky missed this forum.  I do know that missing a League of Women Voters-sponsored wingding sure does look bad.

Maybe Two Men and a Truck had scheduled that delivery of milk crate shelves, mini fridge and futon to Thieneman’s house long before this forum was sprung on Tobo.

Here’s Sean Rose’s story in today’s Courier-Journal: District 3 school board candidates talk student achievement.

Long story, short – Wesslund attempted to deflect attention from forced busing: “I think we’re spending too much time defending an assignment plan that’s flawed and we need to fix it, but then we need to get to student achievement.”

And Smithson was described as “emphasizing neighborhood schools above anything else.”  He then proceeded to queue up some Satchmo on his iPod.

I’m kidding on that last line.  Kind of.

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Superintendent Sheldon Berman flips the double-bird to little kids who spend 2-3 hours a day on a school bus; declares JCPS’s stand on forced busing is “no retreat”

Here’s are a few lines from an October 1, 2010 article in USA Today that are sure to send your blood pressure skyrocketing:

“No retreat” has become the official mantra of Jefferson County School Superintendent Sheldon Berman and other school administrators in Louisville. In other places, most recently Wake County, N.C., school boards have moved back to neighborhood-school plans, which can mean plentiful resources for students in affluent areas but the opposite for students in low-income places.

What’s that?  “Plentiful resources for students in affluent areas but the opposite for students in low-income places”?  So, if we return to neighborhood schools does that mean JCPS is going to let schools in less-affluent neighborhoods fall into disrepair and the students will be forced to use outdated textbooks, have non-degreed teachers and get crammed into overcrowded classrooms?

Give me a break.

Do you think USA Today got their doom-and-gloom scenario from the we-love-student-assignment-but-have-no-kids-in-JCPS Courier-Journal editorial board?  You know, since both rags are owned by Gannett and seem to have the same remarkable, hard-hitting style of investigative journalism.

Here’s the entire USA Today piece by Joan Biskupic:  In Louisville, new turn in school integration

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Here’s a link to Lincoln Elementary’s twelve-page bus schedule which has 16 bus routes that start around 7:30 a.m.  School starts at 9:05 for these kids.  They get to school in time for breakfast so these kids are on the bus in the morning  for about 1.25 hrs one-way. Notice over half of the buses stop at depots where the kids transfer to a second bus.

Pretty elaborate delivery system, isn’t it?

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