Company that created JCPS bus routes slams audit, blames school district for problems
The Boston firm Jefferson County Public Schools hired to design its bus routes is questioning the accuracy of an investigative report into what went wrong on the first day of school and is shifting blame for many of the problems to the district.
In a 16-page report published earlier this month and obtained by The Courier Journal, AlphaRoute points to several decisions JCPS made that it says substantially changed the bus routes the company created. The report was issued in response to the audit by Prismatic Services Inc., which JCPS hired and paid about $225,000 to investigate the first day disaster.
AlphaRoute’s report states the audit, which is critical of the company, “mistakes many important details and includes many inaccuracies.”
The report by AlphaRoute claims Prismatic is a competitor, making its work for JCPS a conflict of interest and thus calls into question the validity of its audit and characterization of AlphaRoute.
Prismatic founder Tatia Prieto said her company stands by their report, indicating each statement included in the audit "was sourced via interviews, emails, district documents, other documents and observations."
JCPS officials declined to comment on the report, saying their response to the Prismatic audit will be released this week.
AlphaRoute has been working with JCPS in some capacity for several years, earning about $750,000 since 2021. Last year, the company was awarded a $265,000 contract to alter school start times, bus routes and stops ahead of this school year. But the first day of school was met with such significant bus delays that some students didn’t get home until nearly 10 p.m., prompting the closure of schools for the next six to seven days to try to fix the problems.
At the time, AlphaRoute’s founder, John Hanlon, said it was unclear what caused the issues and he was confident the new routes and start times would work as planned — though students have missed several million minutes in instruction time this year due to late buses.
AlphaRoute's report points to district decisions as the cause of multiple inefficiencies. Those decisions include not accounting for the additional time needed when adding extra stops to routes, failing to keep necessary data that would have allowed for a consolidation of stops in a route and making last minute changes that delayed the creation of final routes.
For example, AlphaRoute said Prismatic’s timeline regarding when routes were given to JCPS is incorrect. The audit says they were received in July, but AlphaRoute said it delivered final routes in early May. JCPS, however, asked for a new set of routes and didn’t provide the additional data needed to do so until mid-June, according to AlphaRoute.
Another portion of the report negates a claim by Prismatic that two entire schools did not have routes in their plan. AlphaRoute said that is false, though founder Hanlon told The Courier Journal that there weren't any routes to W.E.B. DuBois' high school campus. That, Hanlon said, is because JCPS didn't indicate the school had more than one campus in data it provided the firm in 2021.
This fact was not mentioned in AlphaRoute's report. The Courier Journal could not confirm whether or not there were significant routing issues with the other school mentioned by Prismatic.
AlphaRoute’s report also took issue with a portion of the audit that criticized the firm for not asking JCPS questions about over-assigning students to a bus.
“There are no questions regarding ‘overbooking’ on buses,” the audit states. “In a high-performing routing department, historical load factors are considered when determining how much (or whether) a bus can be overbooked.”
One example, the audit explains, is that a bus serving high school students could be assigned up to 150 students (which is far more than a bus can transport) because historical data shows only a fraction of the assigned students ever ride the bus.
This situation was addressed with JCPS, according to AlphaRoute, but JCPS wouldn’t allow for that rate of overbooking.
“JCPS stated its limit for high school students assigned to a bus would be 66, something which AlphaRoute pushed back on… In fact, the district initially enforced a lower limit of 55 high school students per bus before increasing it to 60 and finally to 66. AlphaRoute has worked with many districts that allow for over-assignment, and AlphaRoute’s approach can mimic varying levels of over-assignment in its solutions,” the report states.
JCPS’ reasoning for not adhering to this practice could be because it didn’t have the historical ridership data, according to Prismatic, that would allow them to make informed decisions about which buses could be overbooked.
“JCPS leaders reported that actual counts of the number of students riding buses were not collected on a regular, districtwide basis, with some staff indicating they thought the data would be of little help,” Prismatic’s audit states.
One leader told investigators that “the district relied on “gut feeling” regarding ridership,” according to Prismatic.
AlphaRoute also alleges JCPS added 5,000 new stops after the company gave them the final routes in July — a decision made without AlphaRoute's input.
“When adding these stops, the JCPS team consistently failed to correctly adjust the timing of the runs where the stops were assigned,” according to AlphaRoute. “In some cases, JCPS added time for new stops but did not add enough, but in the majority of cases they added no time to the runs at all.”
AlphaRoute said in the routes it provided, an afternoon route for Farmer Elementary had 19 stops and was scheduled to last 66 minutes, but JCPS added six stops to the route and changed the order of the stops. JCPS estimated this would take 85 minutes, but data shows it was more likely to take more than two hours.
AlphaRoute says the audit criticized the firm for the long runs, but:
“Only 217 out of the nearly 3,000 runs in AlphaRoute’s final solution had more than 20 bus stops, compared to roughly 500 in the JCPS solution as of August 11, 2023.”
“Only 32 runs in AlphaRoute’s solution had more than 25 stops, compared to nearly 200 in the JCPS solution.”
“Only 2 runs in AlphaRoute’s solution had more than 30 stops (with a max of 32), compared to 26 in the JCPS solution.”
While JCPS officials have never publicly blamed AlphaRoute for what went wrong, Chief Operations Officer Rob Fulk expressed his opinion that the firm was to blame.
“I also believe the worst mistake in all of this was trusting an unproven outside company to do this much to our systems, and that our drivers are out of their geographic region," Fulk texted to transportation department leaders on Nov. 3.
When asked to comment on Fulk’s assessment, Hanlon with AlphaRoute disagreed.
“For a district leader to characterize AlphaRoute as "unproven" is not fair or consistent with our company's experience and results,” Hanlon wrote to The Courier Journal. “There are certainly lessons learned from this engagement that, in retrospect, would have alleviated some of the district's challenges, including how AlphaRoute worked within a shortened implementation timeline that could have been avoided with earlier decision-making and data sharing from the district. Any attempt to shift blame onto AlphaRoute without acknowledging the conditions and constraints we were asked to accommodate does not fully tell the story of how this situation transpired."
Several of the recommended changes in Prismatic's audit have been addressed, according to Fulk. Additionally, the district created a project manager position after the audit pointed to the lack of one as a major failure.
It is unclear what JCPS has or will do in regards to other issues raised in the audit, including what the audit called the district’s retaliatory culture, its tendency to work in silos and its overuse of sole-vendor contracts rather than the standard bid process.
The district's Audit & Risk Management Advisory Committee is set to make recommendations to the board by July on how to hold leaders accountable to make the necessary changes.
To view AlphaRoute's entire response to Prismatic's audit, view below.
AlphaRoute response to Prismatic audit of JCPS by Krista Johnson on Scribd
Contact Krista Johnson at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: AlphaRoute slams audit report, blames JCPS for busing disaster
