fixin’ the school bus

The Hillsborough County School Board has decided to finally address the asinine bus situation. Currently,

• school busses show up at schools with more than 40% of the seats unoccupied
• In my neighborhood, each bus makes two stops within a couple blocks of each other, and another just across the main street at the stoplight
• Hillsborough transports more students than any other district in Florida, including Miami-Dade (a larger district)
• Twenty percent of all busses are late to school on any given day
• And as we know, student discipline is a problem, as is the morale of the bus drivers

With these facts in hand, the school board wants to tackle the problems:

Management Partnership Services was hired in late July at a cost of up to $225,000 to offer ideas to help the transportation department become more efficient.

Great! The school board spends nearly a quarter million dollars for advice that we gave them FOR FREE! back in 2005:

…school choice is a fantastic idea. It’s just that promising to bus the students all over half the county is stupid. Kids should be assigned one bus to get them from one neighborhood to one school. Those who choose a different school should have to find their own way.

Here are a few more ideas:

• The kids can walk a bit further – 2 stops in 2 blocks does nothing but make these kids lazy.
• Students with discipline problems should not be allowed on the bus. Make the parents responsible to get them to school on time.

I’m sure there are more ideas, but this is what I got at 8am. I bet you can come up with more, and then maybe you and I can get us one of these consulting gigs.