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How to Fail: The Louisville School Bus Catastrophe

Posted on Sep 2, 2023, jshell55

We’re going to tackle the Louisville School Bus Catastrophe now. This crisis, which has still not been completely resolved, has in it a lot of the elements we have talked about that contribute to human failure. The most important part of this story is that it’s only a matter of time before it blows up again.

As Deming would say, a system is set up to perfectly produce the result that it does. So, if you want an example of how to fail, this is the place to look.

Basic Story: The Louisville School Bus Catastrophe

The Louisville KY school system had to completely shut down for several days because the bus system failed. Kids were not getting home until 10 PM, buses were getting lost, and there was general social chaos. The problem has been attributed to lack of drivers. About ⅓ of the system’s school bus drivers quit during Covid. To compensate, the district hired a consultant, AlphaRoute, to use an “algorithm” to do the school bus routing. This made the system even worse.

Based on recent reports, the situation has improved a little. Kids are now only getting home at 7:30.

On the surface of it, there are several of the ongoing themes we have discussed: The system is overmatched. There is a low wage workforce not doing their jobs. There is entrenched mediocrity in the administration. We have use of consultants to solve a problem. But, nothing in this story addresses the main issue which is that the whole place is about to melt down.

Who am I to be telling you this?

Well, I have hands on experience in the quality systems of a lot of very famous companies. I was personally involved in one of the biggest product recall situations in history, and had a million page views as a financial writer.

Also, I had an annual project in Louisville for a few years and have some basic knowledge of the city. It’s not a terrible place but it took a long time to find the nice part of it.

Historical Context

Ah, this. Well, I usually don’t get into this sort of thing because it’s out of my scope. There is a long, hostile relationship between the public school system in Louisville and the world.

The Louisville school system was founded in 1838, making it one of the oldest public school systems in the south. The system was racially segregated until 1975. (Louisville is about 50-50 racially balanced between the Northern European culture and the Freed Slave culture.)

In this place, there was a practice of “redlining.” This is an illegal practice that historically got people to live in certain parts of town based on their race. The result of that was that the neighborhood schools in these places were heavily segregated. In 1975 there was a court decision that forced the local school system to fix this by busing students out of their neighborhoods and into others to achieve some racial mixing.

Nobody liked this. There were riots. The National Guard had to be called in. At one point a few years ago, the system shut down a lot of the neighborhood schools that needed “reinvestment” because they didn’t bother to maintain them originally. Guess where these were?

There is a lot of disagreement on whether or not this accomplished anything.

Now it is now

The whole town of Louisville had riots during Covid, as you will remember, because the cops broke in on some poor innocent person and shot her because they had the wrong address. The underlying racial hostility in the school system still exists. 25% of the kids in town have bailed out of the system and gone to private schools, leaving, we guess, the kids that can’t afford to leave in the Louisville schools.

Nowadays, the “West End” area has one of the highest percentages of people born outside of the US in the nation, and the primary nationality is Somalian.

A few years ago there was an Anti-Busing court decision that led to projects to construct “magnet schools” in the areas of town that were previously underserved. But, when Covid hit, everything came to a bit of a screeching halt and construction was stopped.

The School Bus Driver Situation

In the grand scheme of things, Louisville is not a terrible place to work. There are a couple of big automotive assembly plants there. The largest air hub of UPS is there. That means there is a little island of decent wages there for anybody with a work ethic.

What that also means is that the “rest of the employers” have to work very hard to recruit employees, and there is competition for a certain kind of worker. The local Ford plant is paying $17 to $22 per hour, depending on the source. A lot of the area is unionized, and there are benefits.

The school system lost ⅓ of its bus drivers when Covid hit, and have been unable to replace them. Another part of the problem is that in 2017 the school system implemented a system of background checks that discouraged people from showing up to work drunk or high, or being a pedophile.

To try to compensate, the school system is now paying somewhere around $21 per hour for new bus drivers, with a hiring bonus.for anyone with the nerve to do this job, which is a hard job.

According to the article below, there are around 620 bus drivers, and as late as July they were bragging that there were more drivers than routes. What they didn’t say was how much they cut back on the number of routes.

The Louisville School Bus Catastrophe: Enter the Consultants

The district knew for a long time that there was going to be a problem and so they brought in a company called AlphaRoute that uses a high-tech algorithm, developed by MIT brainiacs. They paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $250K for this service.

The CEO of this place is a former administrator in the Boston public schools. After having driven in both places, I’d have to rate them about equally annoying from a driving standpoint.

The idea was that the company was going to re-engineer the routes, based on starting times and known addresses of kids. What they didn’t take into consideration was the fraction of the population who is out to lunch, and did not get the messages and/or in a constant state of moving. So as late as the first day of school, which was August 8th, a sizeable fraction of the system had no idea what they were doing, and this included a lot of the parents.

AI didn’t take into consideration terrible communication, and a population that is cut off from social cohesion anyway.

Technostress

We have talked about “technostress” before. This is where a lot of people have physical symptoms in dealing with technology that doesn’t work and is hard to learn. Well, this is an example of this to the extreme. “They” said “we’ll use AI and it will solve all of our problems” and then somebody else said “yeah” and they were half right.

Who is “they” exactly? Well we have talked about this before also. This type of decision is commonly made by the “amorphous they.” This is that voice that comes from the back of the room in one of those big meetings. If you were to investigate this, you’d be hard pressed to tell exactly who made the decision.

A potential clue was somehow missed on this one though. The software had been tried a year or two in Columbus Ohio and AlphaRoute ended up getting fired over it. “They” seem to have missed that detail. Who could have predicted that?

Anyway, this idea of looking to some miracle technological cure for a seeming intractable problem will have to be the topic of another article.

Current Status

Well, an additional 8 of the 620 school bus drivers in Louisville have quit in the last week. However, in the grand scheme of things, it is very common for people to quit nowadays. I’m actually surprised it is that low. I work with companies that hire from this labor pool and to have 10% of this kind of worker quit in the first month is not unusual at all.

For those of you who are math challenged, that would be 62.

There were still reports on Facebook last week of ongoing disruptions. It has fallen out of the news cycle for some reason. I guess we have other stuff going on.

Future Status

Are you kidding? It’s only a matter of time before this problem blows up again. Do you want to know when it is going to happen? Right after Thanksgiving, when the weather turns cold and the first snowstorm comes through.

Nothing is being done to solve the several underlying problems: There are not enough schools in the neighborhood, and there is no money to build them. The local residents are suspicious, and mistrust the “institution.” Taxpayers have no tolerance for spending money on this especially since those with money have already opted out of the system.

That is the very definition of “entrenched mediocrity.” A set of known problems is allowed to continue, often for political reasons. Who can fix it? It is nobody’s job to do so. The State of Kentucky is said to be on the brink of taking over the school system, like that will solve the problem.

None of this has anything to do with teaching kids math, which might eventually solve the problem. At some point this was determined to be the government’s job, and it’s a bit of a mess in places like this where everything else is a mess.

The school system is now expected to solve several other problems. This includes feeding kids, teaching them the birds and bees, and a lot of other jobs that used to be done by parents.

Louisville School Bus Catastrophe: What Next?

So now what? Well, not only is this going to be an ongoing problem but you’re going to see it elsewhere. This is yet another case of system failure because of a set of decades-old underlying assumptions. It was assumed that there would always be enough school drivers, and the population would be alert enough to get their kids to the bus stop. Also, that fuel would be cheap enough to make it work.

If you take away those assumptions, you’re in trouble.

For that matter, the fundamental model of the education system is also looking iffy. That’s where you get eager kids sitting in front of a wise teacher, in some building with a flag in front of it. That system is vulnerable to disruption. Do you know the starting salary for a certified teacher in Louisville? I do. It’s 14% below the national average, and less than the UPS hub. What’s going to happen?

I’m not about to fix Louisville. That is up to them, but as McCaig’s Law says, nothing happens in isolation. A screwed up situation like that is only the outward facing sign of other underlying problems.

Anyway, as I have said before, one person’s screw up is another person’s revenue stream. I have a few ideas, and for $250,000 I will share them with any school system that wants to know them.

Here is my link to Udemy course, “How Not to Fail at ISO9001”

https://www.udemy.com/course/how-not-to-fail-at-iso9001/learn/lecture/34733460#content

Here’s the link to my Quality Systems Training. You can hire me to give this training in person, complete with questions and answers, and along with a few decades worth of horror stories about product quality, dangerous products, and why people don’t do their jobs.