DCPS pushes start of school to Monday
Aug. 12—Daviess County Public Schools announced Thursday afternoon that the 2022-23 academic year will begin Monday, Aug. 15.
The school year, which was scheduled to have begun Wednesday, was pushed back by DCPS officials Tuesday night due to transportation issues, with the hope the issue would be resolved for school to start today, Aug. 12. However, officials have deemed it prudent to allow ample time for communication with DCPS families about changes to bus routes.
"Daviess County Public Schools district schools will be closed on Friday, Aug. 12 to finalize all routing and provide time to effectively communicate bus information to you — our families," the DCPS statement said. "It is crucial that parents, guardians and students feel comfortable and confident in their bus transportation as they start the year.
"Our transportation and school teams have been working around the clock to remedy the software issue impacting our afternoon bus transportation routing. Significant progress has been made, and we are continuing to meet with staff to ensure the accuracy of the updated routes and data."
DCPS superintendent Matt Robbins said Thursday that the district is progressing through the elementary schools and have been in communication with the middle and high schools about transportation for students.
"We are working through issues with communication with bus drivers and parents and families and finalizing route changes," he said.
Robbins said preschool, special needs and morning transportation routes are going to remain the same as they were before the issues occurred.
"Afternoon routing is being worked on until the data of students routed on the bus agrees with the school data information," he said.
The statement released Thursday stated that the software issue caused a "significant disruption" but the accuracy of the information is "paramount."
"We could not begin our school year without complete certainty that our afternoon transportation needs were met and that each student could be delivered to their destination," it said.
All of the data following the work the district did Wednesday "seems to be working well," Robbins said. "That is significant for us. The data is functioning as it should, and there have been no new issues since we began the work."
Similar to Wednesday and Thursday, Friday will be a make-up day in accordance with the 2022-23 instructional calendar, a DCPS representative confirmed.
Robbins said the plan is to be fully open on Monday with business as usual, and, at this time, he does not anticipate the need for another delay.
"Our plan is to communicate with families with all transportation information as soon as possible," he said.
The work on the rural routes is still in progress, and Robbins said he does not want to send out piecemeal information.
"We want to make sure we have all of the information and have worked with all of the schools before sending out information," he said. "We anticipate having electronic lookup of where families can find information when it's available."
Robbins did not provide the specific schools that the district has worked with over the course of the delay, but said most of the elementary schools have been completed and they were working with middle and high school data Thursday.
"We have been back and forth working with Transfinder between (Wednesday) and (Thursday) and resolving questions," he said. The district is doing "whatever it takes" to resolve the issues.
