Gerth: JCPS busing audit shows Superintendent Marty Pollio is in over his head

When you read the audit report of “the incident,” it looks more and more like a massive failure of leadership.

One mistake after another.

Each one of them compounding the previous mistake. Magnifying it. Making it worse. And worse. And worse.

Until finally on that day last August, Jefferson County School Superintendent Marty Pollio had to cry “uncle” and cancel school the next day, and the next day, and the next day ….

In all, elementary and middle schools would be closed for six days and high schools closed for seven while administrators scrambled to rework the transportation system plan that had left some students sitting on buses until nearly 10 p.m. on that first day.

It's hard to express how utterly devastating the audit report is, and it brings into question whether Pollio has the knowledge and skill to lead a school district of nearly 100,000 students and whether he needs to step down now and let somebody who knows what they’re doing step in.

I went to the school board meeting Tuesday to ask Pollio just a couple of questions.

“Are you going to resign?” and “Why not?”

He wasn’t taking questions after Tatia Prieto, the founder of the company that wrote the audit, flogged him in her presentation in which she outlined failure after failure — never mentioning Pollio by name — and laying it at the superintendent’s feet.

It was probably the smartest thing Pollio has done in the months since the disastrous school opening.

“Significant mistakes were made,” Pollio said near the end of the meeting — seemingly trying to push the blame off on some behemoth bureaucracy and not accepting the role he played in the disaster.

Pollio’s first and biggest mistake, according to the report, was to try and roll out three major initiatives at the same time — a new student assignment plan, a new bus routing plan and a new school start-time plan.

And it went downhill from there. Prieto said she’d advise districts to roll out such huge initiatives one at a time.

JCPS didn’t allow the district’s transportation chief into meetings about the new student assignment plan to raise concerns about how it would affect moving kids from home to school and from school to home.

And when principals raised concerns about the bus routing plans, no one listened to them.

According to the report, 77% of principals who responded to a survey said they had expressed major concerns about the transportation program to people in the chain of command and another 20% said they had some concerns.

Yet 64% said their concerns went unaddressed.

According to the report, 86% of principals said more bus drivers expressed concerns than usual heading into the first day of classes and 89% said more parents said they were worried.

Principals saw this coming. The bus drivers’ union saw this coming. Parents saw this coming.

The only people who didn’t see this coming were the members of the board of education — because Pollio didn’t tell them.

Under Pollio’s failed leadership, the district didn’t increase the number of people working a phone bank designed to help parents navigate the system on the first day of classes.

Under his failed leadership, he didn’t tell the board that the new student assignment, start time and bus routing plans would require 125 more bus routes than the previous plan, according to a vendor who created the routing plan.

When Prismatic Services, Prieto’s company, went to talk to school district employees, a number of them said they worried about retribution from Pollio’s administration.

That should come as no surprise to those who watched Pollio bully a young television reporter who had the audacity to ask why he wasn’t around on what would have been the second day of classes to answer questions about what went wrong.

“That is really an unbelievable question from you,” he lectured her.

Pollio had a good reason not to be around — he was dropping his daughter off at college — but it was a legitimate question he needed to answer without lashing out at the reporter who asked it.

According to the report, under Pollio’s failed leadership employees of the school system have been told by their supervisors not to use email when talking about sensitive subjects and to instead use text messaging “because it was perceived that texting was less subject to open records requirements.”

The district, for the third time in the last few decades, failed to effectively use routing software to help bus drivers. It assigned children to dangerous bus stops that required them to cross busy multi-lane streets to be picked up.

It greatly reduced the number of buses going to “depots” or “hubs,” where students could be sorted and put on a bus that would take them on the last leg of their journey to school or home — something the Prismatic study said worked in Louisville in past years and has worked elsewhere.

The list goes on and on and on.

One leadership failure after another.

But worst of all, Pollio’s failures of leadership has given ammunition to those in Frankfort who want to break up Jefferson County Public Schools into multiple districts — which would be devastating because it would create districts of “haves” and “have nots.”

It’s for all those reasons we should question whether Pollio can continue on in his role.

It’s for all those reasons Pollio, himself, should question it.

Joseph Gerth can be reached at 502-582-4702 or by email at jgerth@courierjournal.com.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: JCPS busing audit shows Marty Pollio is in over his head