LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Jefferson County Public Schools hired the Boston-based company, AlphaRoute, to help streamline its bus route.

JCPS hired the company in Nov. 2022 to design routes for the new school year. Superintendent Dr. Marty Pollio said the District paid the company $265,000 to do the work.

In a news conference addressing the failure of the school bus system on the first day of classes, Polio said he doesn’t blame AlphaRoute, but says the problems came from implementing the plan.

He said, “The company, the software says it is ‘X’ amount of minutes from this stop to the next stop. But what’s not built in is what happens if a parent’s not at that stop and the bus driver has to wait 10 minutes or drive back to school at some point so that, you know, those are things that may not have been built into it. I caused those implementation problems that we should have addressed and we did not do that.”

For the first time in a while, JCPS had more bus drivers — around 620 — than the 600 bus routes it operates. That was supposed to prevent students from getting home late. Having an increased number of bus drivers was also meant to reduce the number of extra trips drivers needed to make, thus getting students to and from school more efficiently than before.

Representatives from AlphaRoute are coming to Louisville the weekend of Aug. 12 to look at the system.