Hacker News Reader

Comment by KennyFromIT | Hacker News Reader

Let's put aside the technology not working for a second...

Isn't it ultimately leadership's responsibility to prevent these situations from occurring in the first place? Shouldn't they have been testing/auditing this system beforehand, addressing risks, and ensuring there were adequate operational plans ready in the event of an issue?

It's easy to blame software (even easier when that software clearly doesn't work), but blame ultimately should be on the people making the decisions along the way that led to this outcome.

View on HN

True, but...

I've never heard of a School Board which had even a "graduated high school" requirement to be a Member. Let alone any "experience in public schools, or running an organization" one.

And even before America's Culture Wars got mixed in, "School Board Member" was generally a crappy job - meager pay, indifferent social status, huge complexity, and the Board is where the buck stops for every student discipline case, delusionally-demanding parent, ill-paid teacher, incomprehensible regulation, and financial impossibility in the district. Add to that minimal thanks when they do get it right, minimal voter turn-out for their elections, and having to do all their work through the full-time school administration bureaucracy - which is almost always self-serving, usually a bit contemptuous of the Board, and almost never the "best and brightest".

School board should terminate so-called leadership, and themselves then resign.

Though this may have something to do with it, staffing blue collar drivers is being handled nation-wide, "...likely caused by the significant changes to bus routing which were made necessary by the district’s severe driver shortage...".

You can run simulations perhaps, but it's not really possible to test this outside of production.

Running the routes on the real streets on a non-school day would show if your routes are completely non-feasible, but traffic patterns are different on school days. The first week of school is almost always worse than the rest of the weeks because there tends to be more bunching.

With a totally new transit plan, there's going to be a lot of bottlenecks that are hard to discover.

You could maybe run a test of the new routes during the school day toward the end of the previous school year, but you would need an extra fleet of busses and drivers, so that's a big expense. Not to mention, some school districts finalize their transit plans weeks before the start date when enrollment is firm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com