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Spending Money Without a Plan

Ohio County education leaders are seeking some artificial help in solving a four-year-old problem — how to start school an hour later at Wheeling Park High School.

Ohio County Board of Education members this week approved spending $24,750 with a California-based company that will use artificial intelligence to determine the most efficient use of bus routes in Ohio County.

The company, HopSkipDrive, will use AI to run multiple models of the county’s bus routes to see if there’s a better way to run the buses. The company currently contracts with a number of school districts across the country.

“The thing I was impressed with the most was that HopSkipDrive offered the most intriguing option. They just have AI do it,” board of education member Andy Garber said. “They say here’s the statistics. They feed it into the computer and AI spits out what it thinks will be viable.”

That’s all well and good — using AI to help solve this problem makes sense — but what about the $10,000 expenditure in 2022 to Edulog for a study on how to more efficiently run bus routes?

It’s this simple: either the first $10,000 expenditure to Edulog was a waste of taxpayer dollars, or this current $24,750 expenditure to HopSkipDrive is a waste of taxpayer dollars. It can’t be that complicated to figure out how to run the buses in a county that’s less than 106 square miles.

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