The Republic from Columbus Indiana reports that the Jefferson County School Busing program doesn’t look too good to two of the three judges on a Kentucky appeals court. Opinions of a third jurist were not revealed during the hearing which did not render a final ruling in the case.

The reporter indicates that comments made during the legal proceedings show two of the judges believe Louisville’s “social experiment” needs to end.

The news article reports that Judge Kelly Thompson said:

“I’d like to ask that you concentrate on neighborhood schools and get out of the courtroom. You’ve got more litigation than any school district in the country.”

Thompson said the school district needs to abandon plans that bus students way across Jefferson County.

The news story says that a second judge, Thomas Caperton, is apparently leaning in the same direction as Judge Thompson. Thoughts of the third panel member, Judge Sara Combs, who is the widow of former Gov. Bert T. Combs, remain unknown.

The legal issue under debate concerns a provision in Kentucky law that says if a large area is consolidated into a single school district, then parents have the right to “enroll” their children in a neighborhood school. Such a large area combination occurred years ago when several school districts in the Jefferson County area were consolidated into the enormous Jefferson County School District, which is one of the nation’s 50 largest today.

The school district contends that the term enroll only refers to the act of registering a student but does not guarantee attendance at that school. The parents contest this is just Jefferson County lawyers playing on wording and the statute clearly intended to allow parents to determine that their child would attend a neighborhood school and would not be involuntarily transferred at the whim of Jefferson County school bureaucrats to another school that could be more than a one hour school bus ride away.

In fact, some of those Jefferson County school bus rides are proving to be considerably longer than one hour, as I mentioned recently.

That probably starts to look like child abuse to reasonable adults.

WXIX news reports the Jefferson County school bus plan is headed for another court review to see if it complies with state law.

The Jefferson County school bus system requires some students to take bus rides clear across Louisville – trips that take more than an hour one way – even though schools are located much closer to a child’s residence and parents don’t want their children on the bus for so long.

The busing plan is an outgrowth of 40 years of busing to achieve integration. But, after four decades, if this idea was going to work, don’t you think by now the city would have been naturally integrated as minorities got better educations that enabled them to get better jobs and move to the more affluent and desirable parts of the city?

It will be interesting to see what the court decides.

The ACT score release had me tied up last week, but searching through the Courier-Journal’s web site today, this very short article popped up.

It says, “Last JCPS student off bus at 6:15 p.m. Thursday.”

The article goes on to say the last student got home on the first day of school about an hour later (it was 7:13 p.m., per another Courier article).

School gets out in Jefferson County at 3:45 PM. So, on day one of school, some poor kid was stuck somewhere between school and home at the end of the school day for 3-1/2 hours. It only got reduced to 2-1/2 hours in this transportation maze on Thursday for another kid (maybe the same one?). As one astute Courier reader pointed out, you can drive to Cincinnati in that amount of time.

If the district keeps this up, it may not take until spring for stories to start appearing about the violence on the buses.

After all, the kids already have had a year of ‘bus boredom education’ to get them ready.

WAVE-3.com reports that when school starts up again in Jefferson County schools on August 15th, some students will still face excessively long bus rides – over an hour one way – even though all kids there live much closer to a suitable school.

By the close of last year’s school term, those long hours on the bus were turning into the inevitable mayhem, with fights and disruptions a virtual daily occurrence.

Why is the learning curve for the people running this school district so shallow?

Meanwhile, the Courier-Journal is justifiably upset about the school board hiding a busing plan that might have cut down on the excesses. The paper has published two separate related editorials since this story broke on August 3, the first editorial ran on August 6 and the second on August 10.