My E-mail to The JCPS Board Regarding Their Decision To Remove Transportation to Most Magnets

Good morning,

Congratulations to four of you for accomplishing what so many in Louisville have wanted all along.   Neighborhood schools, segregation, and enough overall dysfunction being demonstrated by both the board and its administration to make pretty much everyone in the city and state want to have SOMETHING.... ANYTHING.... done. 

The board screwed up when you trusted Marty Pollio and his team that said we needed a ridiculously convoluted plan to fix transportation.   And I get it.  Maybe, like me, you thought his heart and head were in the right place.   But it should have been obvious from the first day that he was not up to the task, nor was his team.  

I'm honestly not sure if Alpharoute was hired to fix things, or simply share the blame for destroying them.   Because again, the people that have long sought to destroy what 1975 brought us are finally getting their wish.    

And after paying hundreds of thousands to Alpharoute, we hired another company to tell us how Alpharoute and JCPS screwed up.   They did, in ways that seemed to withstand scrutiny. 

So what did you do?  You tried to rush a vote.  You did so in a meeting where you didn't open an overflow room until the meeting was underway, and you left at least 100 people out in the rain.   You knew it would be controversial.  You didn't care.   But you did decide to table the vote for a bit after receiving the auditor's report and hearing the thoughts of the auditor.     

In that time, you would think that the district would be trying to figure out a plan B.   Or at least better justifying the fact that there were not better alternatives.   

Rather than wait for the next scheduled board meeting, you called one with 24 hours notice.   You provided no opportunity for speakers prior to the meeting. Again more people were left out in the rain.  I guess some of you were tired of hearing feedback when your mind was made up.   You went into another meeting where you were given three not great options.   And when you questioned those who brought the plan to you, you found out that as the auditors had told you, departments weren't coordinating on feedback for the new plan.    

In the meantime, the voices of the people who will be impacted most are ignored.   

You bought the transportation department less than a week.  You didn't demand accountability from Marty Pollio and the team that brought you this disaster.  You didn't demand a plan for the flaws found by the auditors.  You didn't demand an explanation for how this new plan will work.  

We have five months.  We had far longer than that previously, and still Pollio and his team blew everything up.  Ignoring the consequence to students, do you think that pulling transportation from magnets is NOT going to have a ripple effect on schools and transportation for next year?   Parents are going to be demanding answers, looking for transfers, and seeking to make major changes to their enrollment. The schools currently have no real idea how these changes will impact their enrollment, class sizes, car rider lines, bus crowding, and more.   Will staffing need to shift to accommodate more students at school X vs school Y?   Will teachers decide to quit, retire, or transfer?  Does anyone know?  Is there anything beyond an 8 page Powerpoint with a few sentences to provide a roadmap?   

Maybe you had no choice.  Maybe you're tired of hearing about it and want to move on.  But I would have hoped that getting played by the administration would have made all of you a little more angry and wanting accountability than you have been.  

Three of you made the right vote last night.  But all of you should have been publicly demanding more from a Superintendent who appears in every meeting like he's simply counting the days until you push him into retirement, and an administration that seems to be so overwhelmed by everything that's happened that nobody can coordinate a true crisis response that gets all the right people on board, despite having months to do so.   

You all have a tough job.  Certainly one tougher than the legislators who are now laughing about this have, and one with a hell of a lot more public input and accountability than true clowns like Jason Nemes, Lindsey Tichenor, Ken Fleming, and the other parade of JCPS critics in Frankfort.  But last night made all of us who believed in this board and this superintendent look like fools, and that same crowd in Frankfort is gleefully celebrating.   

Perhaps I should just be happy my family got what we wanted and let it go.   That's what everyone who voted for this seems to want out of the community.   Forgive me if it all makes me a little sick to my stomach.   

The man that you hired and gave a nice fat raise to failed you and this community.   His response was to pass the buck to others who clearly are exhausted and not up to the task.   

Last night you decided to approve that failure with your vote, conspicuously split by a clear racial divide that once again leaves black voices out in the cold.  The forces that have hated busing, desegregation, and a school system that makes it harder to sell real estate are celebrating today.    

Bravo.  

Rob Mattheu

Pencil Panic: Teaching our Kids They're Number 2

After finally winning the battle to keep JCPS from muzzling our kids with their fabric suffocators, protecting our children from reading books that may cause them to feel like they're not alone in the world, and keeping them from the dangers of a diversity, I think it's time that we focus on something that woke educators have been pushing on kids for decades.  

Since I was a boy we've pushed standardized testing.  Booklets of questions from the government, all to be answered on a little sheet of bubbles.    

And is it any wonder that we as a nation, state, and city are failing in these tests?   We subliminally impress upon them they're not winners from the time we announce these assessments of success or failure.  

How, you ask?  

Think about what every child is told he or she must bring on test day to complete his answer sheet.  

A pencil.   And not just ANY pencil, but a Number 2 pencil.   

Why a Number 2?  Because clearly our public school unions are dedicated to the pursuit of telling our children it's not okay to be number 1.   

We love to hand out trophies to runners up and give them stuff just for participating.   And when they take a test, we tell them "hey, don't try too hard.  Number 2 is good enough.  It says so right on your pencil."  And as if that's not enough, the pencils we sell are yellow, the universal color of cowardice.  

The sad thing is even our media encourages this.  Just look at this story about shopping for school supplies.  The liberal rag Courier Journal talks about multiple types of, you guessed it, Number 2 pencils they bought.  

Yeah, some hippie friends of Nancy Pelosi will give you bellyaching stories about how Number 1 lead is too hard, and the lines it leaves aren't dark enough unless you put a lot of effort into it.  That's just the kind of socialist propaganda that got us into the inflationary mess we're in.  Nobody wants to work anymore.  Thanks, Brandon.   

So I ask you to find yourself a number one pencil, if you can in this Democrat run city, and join me at the next school board in protest of also-ran pencils.    

Let Them Play?

Other than a run at bowling, I have never been athletic.  Part of it was my aversion to getting injured, part of it was my aversion to physical activity in 95 degree heat indexes, and part of it was a complete lack of talent helped by a vision problem not properly diagnosed until I was in my twenties.  Academic team was more my speed.  Torn ACLs are rare and the only thing you risk spraining is your mind.   

While I love professional sports, I’ve never quite understood why high school athletics appeals to anyone who isn’t a parent or a high school student.  Our high school teams were seldom great, and Friday nights you were more likely to find me nerding out at my Commodore 64 playing games or listening to CDs than you were to see me at a football game.  In fact, the only football game I remember attending was homecoming, which was required of all class officers.  (I was Class Treasurer. I hated math and never counted a dime).  While I do look back on my high school days with a certain nostalgia, my desire to revisit my high school days died sometime after my third year on Facebook.   

Another thing I’m less a fan of as I get older is death.  Losing my dad two years ago made it clear to me that “he lived a good long life” is a meaningless phrase when you miss someone every day.   

So in these days of COVID-19, I do not understand our continuous drive to force a return to everything we used to do, when it’s clear that what we used to do isn’t a great way of containing the virus.

But that apparently isn’t going to stop high school athletics.  Today parents, coaches, and students are rallying in Frankfort to let kids play.  And today Kentucky’s largest district will meet to discuss returning to play fall sports.  

This comes just days after the Kentucky High School Athletic Association voted to resume play.  The KHSAA believes that low contact sports like football and soccer can be played safely, and to show their confidence in the safety of bringing kids together, they held their via Zoom.   

We’re all tired of COVID-19.  We all want to get back to normal.  We all want to run free without sweating our faces off in a poorly fit piece of cloth while sanding our skin down to the bone every time we wash our hands.   

But I also am tired of us ignoring the reality.  The older you get, the more likely COVID-19 will kill you.   And as a consequence, many of us have sacrificed things we love and being with the people we love to lessen those odds.  I’ve limited contact with my mom because I still feel the pain of losing my father two years ago and don’t want to inadvertently hurt her.  And I wear a mask, distance, and go out as little as possible so that I don’t inadvertently hurt others.  The fact is, the more we try to “get back to normal” the more we delay our ability to do so.  And we leave a trail of dead along the way.  

But I get it.  Sports are fun. Sports build character.  Sports are a great diversion. My daughter and niece played volleyball.  My dad coached my brother in baseball for years.  It was fun to cheer them and their teammates on.  For many kids, this could be their final year to prove themselves for scholarship opportunities or build college resumes.  It’s important. And maybe it’s not that risky.  As certain politicians always tell us, “kids are much less likely than adults to die of the virus!”  If that isn’t a ringing endorsement of returning to play, I don’t know what is.   

So if we want to risk reopening sports in the next few weeks, as they say in the Hunger Games, “may the odds be forever in our favor.”   Let’s just hope we leave a smaller body count than they did in Panem.