A SECOND OPINION
This space is for our physician members to speak their minds freely on both medical or non-medical issues of the day and respond to the opinions of others . The GLMS Editorial Board reserves the right to choose what will be published . Please note that the views expressed in A Second Opinion or any other article in this publication are not those of the Greater Louisville Medical Society or Louisville Medicine .
SECOND OPINION
I
am a parent of three Jefferson County Public School students , two seventh graders and one fifth grader who fancies himself a rising high school senior . I am also a JCPS alumnus , all awkward 12 years of it . In fact , before I matched in residency at a hospital affiliated with a Jesuit institution of higher learning , I hadn ’ t spent a day in a private educational institution since kindergarten . In all of this , I am good and damn proud . God willing , my kids will graduate from public school armed with the knowledge of a common good and their existence in a world filled with people who look , live and worship in infinite permutations to them .
However , as I write this , on what was supposed to be the fourth day of the 2023-2024 academic school year , it is a difficult day to be a public school parent , student , teacher or bus driver . The transportation meltdown that ensued on the first day of the academic year is certainly not fresh news for anyone in Louisville residing aboveground . However , in our current culture of hierarchal workplace structures rife with trickle down edicts , it is not surprising news either .
28 LOUISVILLE MEDICINE
Those in the Know
by JOHN DAVID KOLTER , MD
JCPS leadership , helmed by superintendent Dr . Marty Pollio , is tasked with providing transportation options for about 100,000 kids from all walks of life and corners of town ( about 65,000 of them actually use the provided transportation ). The school system sought new bus routing software to reduce the number of bus routes due to both challenges with bus driver hiring and route duplication . JCPS purchased software from the transportation routing company AlphaRoute , whose founders have roots at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( the redundancy with which this has been reported seems to suggest that we in Kentucky should be either particularly impressed by their pedigree or more forgiving of their shortcomings ). The alliance formed by the software purchase should have made AlphaRoute part of the team , with some stake in the success of the bus routing . However , judging by their initial statement after the transportation debacle , the software purchase merely granted them status as a favorite business culture caricature , a consultant . A later , more detailed statement issued by AlphaRoute , not worth reprinting here , was 122 words in length , not one of them an acceptance of any responsibility .
The weekend after the ill-fated start of school , I commiserated with a fellow public school dad , whose day job is in corporate HR leadership for a large manufacturing firm , while on the sidelines of our kids ’ soccer game . I made the assertion that JCPS leadership had unlikely solicited feedback from the bus drivers regarding the feasibility of the new routes , lest the drivers be distracted from the paper printouts they were given to navigate the routes ( honestly , had JCPS been swindled in to using MapQuest to plot their new routes ??). My fellow concerned father was visibly uncomfortable with my assertion , and understandably so . The accusation that a traditionally structured leadership , not unlike in his own company , following business cultural norms of taking little stock in the opinions and feedback of the proletariat , even at the risk of disastrous outcomes , would be a hard pill to swallow .
However , as was already being reported widely in local media at the time of my field-side conversation , and flying about in chatter