“But we used AI !!!”
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This. Depending on the state/district, candidates might need background and pre-employment drug checks, too. Due to the rise of anti-vaxxers and waivers, the health risk associated with the job is still a problem. Maybe those folks who don’t believe in measles and chicken pox are home-schooling their kids, or maybe not. 
States are offering training and financial incentives, but just like with lifeguards, shortages will probably continue. 
Have many private schools been reported to be struggling like this?
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Being a mathematician myself, I’m surprised that I’m saying this but: It’s computationally infeasible in theory, but to make a realistic use case, you just have to get a better solution than human planners; you don’t have to get the optimum. Further, you should view it as a proposal process where you reveal what the school district+families actually want by showing them possibilities and having them evaluate them. (e.g. there might not be any way of knowing that an intersection is bad from the map data or that no one obeys the 15mph limit on a road.) The loss function is actually unknown.
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One of my partners lives in Louisville. (She didn’t grow up there.) She’s not sure she believes they have schools their either. Sure, there are buildings that claim to be schools, but you can put up a sign in front of your building declaring it to be anything, that doesn’t make it so.
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That’d be a bad bet. Via the Louisville Courier:
Those changes were done through a $265,000 contract with the Boston firm, AlphaRoute. The company’s plan, which relied on artificial intelligence, cut the number of bus stops by nearly half, allowing the district — for the first time — to employ more drivers than routes.
Of course, almost everything is called AI these days.
That said, Columbus City also used AlphaRoute and had problems, but theirs seemed to be not having enough drivers according to an official with Columbus’ transportation department:
“Our primary challenge was the national shortage of bus drivers, which forced us to put more students on fewer buses,” Stufflebean said. “While AlphaRoute helped us create routes, we didn’t have enough drivers to cover all of the routes, and we didn’t know enough about the system to be able to make changes or updates on the fly.”
Though it seems the integration was different:
How Columbus has utilized AlphaRoute is different than JCPS, [AlphaRoute CEO] Hanlon said, with JCPS having “access to our software but only uses it as a reference tool and added resource for now. This is not the same scope of work as we implemented in Columbus last year.”
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The ones in my area are, and of course far worse than public school as their pool of money is finite. One of my staff who has his kids in a private school mentioned they just fully cancelled the bus service altogether.
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School always began the Thursday after Labor Day in the Detroit suburb where I grew up. It was hot as hell and no school I attended had A/C. Spending an August day in school in KY sounds fucking appalling. It sounds as appalling as marty pollio’s work so far.
ETA: The school year always ended on June 14th, Flag Day. When I was in grade school it was a half day, even better! It was already hotter’n hell again by mid-June.
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Same thing in New Jersey. Those of us in the band had three weeks of camp before school started. We practiced marching, music, and two show routines (for football games and competitions) during the dog days of August. 
At least they didn’t make us wear the uniforms until the end.
There are drum & bugle corps in my area recruiting members for fun, but my flashbacks make me say…
Climate change issues and transportation problems like the ones in KY are on the rise. The government is pushing to bring broadband to more communities and close the digital divide. Some folks hate it, but virtual education options might be a solution. It doesn’t have to be all day, either.
Due to overcrowding, we had four grades in alternating morning or afternoon five-hour sessions. Busses did a double pickup and drop-off when morning session ended and afternoon session began. If we’d had videoconference options back then it could’ve supplemented in-person lessons, extracurricular meetings, or tutoring.
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Band nerds!
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