Shelly's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day

This from Toni Konz in Tuesday's C-J:

JCPS says 400 students delivered home late,

some after 9 p.m.

Jefferson County Public Schools' new busing plan stumbled badly in its debut Tuesday when more than 400 students weren't returned home until after 6 p.m. — with a dozen failing to get home until after 9 p.m.

Lauren Roberts, spokeswoman for the district, said 400 of those students were from three schools — Chancey, King and Lincoln elementaries — and were transported home late because school staff did not tag students properly, which “resulted in major problems and caused a major delay in getting them home.”

“We are very, very disappointed in how this day ended,” Roberts said. “It was a day that had gone so well and so smoothly.”

“For some reason, the procedure was not followed,” she said. “We will find out what happened and it will be fixed tomorrow.”

As a result,

Two JCPS elementary principals have been suspended indefinitely in response to Tuesday's busing problems that resulted in more than 400 students getting home hours later than they should have.

King Elementary principal Julia Lewis and Lincoln Elementary principal Sonya Unseld have been suspended with pay while the district investigates problems that resulted in hundreds of students from their schools being improperly tagged to return home on buses, Superintendent Sheldon Berman said.

Check out C-J education reporter Toni Konz's very bad day.

More on the Draud e-mails

Toni Konz has posted more information on Commissioner Jon Draud's car on C-J's Learning Curve blog.

In an e-mail dated Feb. 7 from Jim Sawrie, a commercial fleet salesman at Freedom Dodge, Chrysler and Jeep in Lexington, to Mike Gustafson with the finance cabinet, Sawrie wrote in bold letters that for upgrade in engine that Draud wanted, there would be "an additional charge of $10,946 added to the state price of $18,101."

On Jan. 14, Sawrie sent an e-mail to Gustafson that said, "to get GPS you would have to move up models and pkgs from the 300 LX to the 300 limited, that is a huge price move plus the GPS option is in a pkg that costs $1,600, would be better to buy him a $400.00 GPS, but I will price this unit out if you need a mod addition."

On Feb. 7, Robin Kinney, the education department's associate commissioner for operations, asked Draud's secretary, Jody Smith, to "pass along the information regarding his automobile purchase. Please let me know if he would like us to proceed based upon the price quote below, or if he would like to revise/modify his request."

On Feb. 11, Smith replied to Kinney, "Dr. Draud said to proceed with the order based on the information price/quote."

On April 15, Perry sent an e-mail to Kinney saying that Draud had telephoned "asking that we check into the status of his car." "Dr. Draud has asked that we contact the dealership to move the car along," Perry wrote.

On April 16, Kinney sent an e-mail to Valerie Blade-Thomas in the education department's financial and materials management office, saying that, "per our discussion, I have today advised the commissioner that you will call at least
once a week to check on the status of his automobile order. Please continue to
make this a top priority."

KSN&C welcomes C-J to the Education blogosphere

The Learning Curve, a new education blog put together in time for the start of the 2007-08 school year by the education writers of The Courier-Journal; Nancy C. Rodriguez, Toni Konz and Daarel Burnette.

We are very excited about this new opportunity to communicate with our readers about different things going on in the world of education that don't necessarily make the print edition of the newspaper.

We plan on using this blog as a place to post events and snippets that are taking place in classrooms, schools, colleges and universities both locally and across the state. We also would like to use it as a way to give our readers a "Behind the Scenes" look at some of the stories that do make it into the paper and first-person accounts of some of the stories we cover. We plan to post at least three or four times a week, maybe more.

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Welcome Y'all. Let us know when you have your feed set up.