After receiving what she called “numerous” complaints about foster children in Kentucky without supervision by trained staff, state Auditor Allison Ball said Tuesday the Office of the Ombudsman will investigate.

Calling it an “ongoing crisis” that is “years” in the making, Ball said the will investigate the Cabinet for Health and Family Services to get at the root causes.

Terry Brooks, the executive director of Kentucky Youth Advocates, said the problem isn’t new — and solving it won’t be  simple or cheap.

It involves a “niche population” of high-needs youth who likely need specialized care, he told the Lantern.

“It’s not typically 5-year-old kids who look like they fell off a TV commercial,” Brooks said. “You’re talking about older kids, teenagers, high levels of acuity, probably some special needs, probably with a history of aggressive behavior. I’m painting a portrait of a young person who we definitely need to care for, but we know it’s going to take creativity and resources to be able to do that.”

A spokesperson for the auditor said the office thinks the practice has “been going on for two years and has affected about 300 children, but we’ll know exactly once we dig in.”

The cabinet said in a statement that it has “taken action to address the challenges that come with placing youth with severe mental and behavioral problems or a history of violence or sexual aggression with foster families or facilities.”

“We’ve publicly addressed this many times with lawmakers and have offered more funding to secure additional safe, short-term care options for youth,” a cabinet spokesman said. “When one of these placements are necessary, we work to make sure each youth has a safe place to stay until a placement can be made. We urge those interested in becoming a foster parent to help us meet the needs of all our youth, please visit .”

In 2023, The Courier Journal reported that a was a factor in the state’s decision to house some youth in a Louisville office building. earlier this year that the practice has continued, despite concerns raised by a Louisville judge.

“My office has continued to receive numerous complaints of foster children and teenagers sleeping on cots and air mattresses in office buildings, often not supervised by trained staff,” Ball said in a statement. “I have instructed the Ombudsman’s Office to investigate this issue to uncover the problems associated with this ongoing crisis.”

“The vulnerable children of Kentucky deserve to be placed in nurturing environments where they are provided with the resources, stability, and care they need,” Ball said.

Staff are still trying to confirm how many office buildings are involved, a spokesperson for Ball said, though “we can confirm that this is not exclusively a Jefferson County issue.” 

Sleeping in an office building can compound trauma youth already have experienced, Brooks said. “It certainly is not going to create a positive childhood experience,” he said. “It’s going to create more adversity to kids who have already experienced too much adversity.”

Kentucky ‘can’t do this on the cheap’

Kentucky needs more families to , but it also needs a better system to support children who can’t be placed, Brooks said. Kentucky must “incentivize” — through higher wages and reimbursements — a “willingness to take on tough cases.”.

Lawmakers can look to Tennessee, he said, which has faced and responded by increasing  payments to foster parents and wages to state staff working with higher-needs children.

“They have just owned the fact that,‘if I’m getting paid $15 an hour, I’m probably not going to be volunteering to get bitten, spit on and other issues with tough kids,’” Brooks said.

Another solution Kentucky should consider, Brooks said, would be  to — safe, secure, designated spaces — to temporarily house children who can’t immediately be placed.

“If the General Assembly cares about those kids sleeping in offices as much as (CHFS Secretary Eric Friedlander) and Auditor Ball, then they’ve got to take action,” Brooks said. “And it can’t be rhetorical. It has to be resources. So I don’t know if that is looking at existing resources, I don’t know if that’s taking the big swing (and) reopening the budget, but you can’t do this on the cheap.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com. Follow Kentucky Lantern on and .

But the , a music group made up of second- to 12th-graders began in humbler circumstances at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School in Louisville, Kentucky. In 1993, Downs was searching a school closet for bulletin board paper but found a closetful of instruments instead. So, she asked her students if they wanted to do a concert. 

“You know, being second- and third-graders, they’re fearless,” she said. “So they were just, ‘Let’s do this!”

First, they played at a PTA meeting and then at a nursing home. Ms Downs said the invitations to perform kept coming, leading them to play all over Louisville, and then across the country. 

In 2003, the group became a non-profit organization, offering the Leopard experience to more kids beyond King Elementary. Three years later, HBO documented the group’s journey to New York City to open for the Chick Corea Trio in the film The Leopards Take Manhattan. 

But what really skyrocketed the Leopards to stardom was when a YouTube video of them playing Ozzy Osbourne’s Crazy Train went viral.

“Out of the blue, we got a check from Ozzy Osbourne to help support our group,” Downs said. 

A couple years later, they were invited to appear on the reality show Ozzy and Jack’s World Detour. 

“Some of the kids didn’t know who he was, so we had to do a little education, and they know who he is now,” she added.

The group’s cover of Led Zeppelin later also went viral on YouTube. Downs said the views went from 6,000 to 6 million views in a week. The students did interviews with media outlets all over the world. 

While the students don’t really understand the impact that the group had in their lives when they were younger, Downs said, “I have had alumni come back to me and just say, ‘I can’t believe I did that when I was a kid… I can’t believe that happened to me.”

It wasn’t until after 7 p.m. that evening when the boys, 5-year-old William and 8-year-old Joseph, arrived on a school bus unharmed.Their delayed return was the result of what officials at Kentucky’s Jefferson County Public Schools a “transportation disaster”: A tech-enabled bus routing system implemented to improve efficiency backfired and some kids didn’t make it home until nearly 10 p.m. 

“I was wondering, ‘Is my son safe?’ ” Bramel told The 74. “Are they safe? Are they OK? Did anything happen?”

Months later, Bramel is once again upset and concerned that his kids had been left vulnerable. Again, technology is the culprit. After the bus delay fiasco, school officials in Louisville signed up for a GPS tracking system offered by the Montana-based company Education Logistics, commonly known as Edulog. Through an app, the system gives parents real-time information about the location of their children’s school buses. 

The service offers parents valuable updates about bus arrivals and departures and tools like it have been embraced by families and heralded by school officials across the country, especially when there are busing snafus. Bramel said he now regularly relies on the Edulog service. Yet in Louisville and at districts nationwide, cybersecurity researchers found, vulnerabilities could have left sensitive data open to exploitation by bad actors. 

James Sebree, a senior staff research engineer at Maryland-based cybersecurity company Tenable, said his inquiry into Edulog’s Parent Portal began after a friend voiced security concerns as it was being rolled out at his child’s school. . Because the Edulog apps lacked sufficient authentication and access controls, anybody could access a large swath of sensitive information about students and families with little more than a free account. Among the exposed records were the real-time location of school buses, pick-up and drop-off times, information about scheduled delays, logs of students who were assigned to specific routes and their parents’ contact information. 

“It was startling to see the extent to which we were able to access information by bypassing the client-side restrictions, particularly when that information involved minors,” Sebree said in an email to The 74. Sebree said his firm isn’t aware of any instances where the data was actually exploited by bad actors and that Edulog worked quickly to patch the vulnerabilities once Tenable alerted them to the issues in early September. But the bug while it existed, he said, was relatively easy to exploit. 

“GPS data in conjunction with parental contact information, if compromised,” he said, “ could lead to scary situations for parents and students.”

School districts nationwide have increasingly turned to GPS tracking systems to help keep parents in the loop about arrival and departure times, particularly amid a national that’s led to chaos in many places and education leaders having to rethink their transportation logistics. 

In Louisville, the school bus woes forced leaders to cancel classes for several days right at the beginning of the new academic year. Last March, Chicago Public Schools to address widespread transportation hurdles of its own, including canceled routes and unreliable service. In some instances, the district has called on taxis and paid $500 transportation stipends to parents to get kids to and from school. 

As school districts increasingly turn to thousands of third-party education technology vendors to streamline instruction and across all parts of their operations, the Edulog vulnerability highlights how such arrangements can introduce new privacy and security risks, especially when for-profit companies collect sensitive information like real-time location data involving students. 

Edulog claims more than 6 million students are transported on school buses equipped with its software. Recent customers include the school districts in Wichita, Kansas, Newport News, Virginia, and Greenwich, Connecticut, according to data from GovSpend, which tracks government procurement. 

In , the company acknowledged that it had been notified of “a potential vulnerability” and that they had “researched the issue and resolved it in the next build of the product.” Yet the company is not contractually obligated to notify their customer districts or parents that the weakness was uncovered, Lam Nguyen-Bull, Edulog’s chief experience officer and general counsel, told The 74 in an interview. At the same time, she recognized the student safety risks involved in the potential breach of real-time GPS data is “certainly a concern.” 

“That’s something that districts have to weigh, as it is any time you get into a service like this: What are you willing to risk and is it worth the cost?” she said. “You can take as many cautions as possible, but a creative and dedicated person will always be able to find a vulnerability.” 

Mark Hebert, the Jefferson County Public Schools spokesperson, said in an email the Louisville district relies on Edulog’s “Lite” version, which offers parents bus location information “but little else.” 

Yet for Bramel, news that the bus tracker that he found so handy carried privacy risks brought newfound anxiety. Bramel said that he had heard rumors about a Edulog security lapse but hadn’t received formal outreach from the district, leaving him to wonder about the types of information that could have been exposed. 

He said school transportation in Louisville remains so erratic that he’s considered moving out of the district boundaries altogether. Allowing anyone access to real-time school bus information, he said, could have been catastrophic. 

“That’s infuriating because that puts my child at risk, that’s their life in danger,” he said. “A perpetrator could be meeting up or something like that. Human trafficking is still going on.” 

The privacy implications of bus trackers

Edulog’s Nguyen-Bull noted that privacy issues have been present ever since GPS services were first introduced to consumers in the late 1980s. Such implications are perhaps amplified in the context of students and schools, but ultimately, she said, they take a back seat for most people.

“The truth is, we generally are lazy beings, right?” Nguyen-Bull said. “We go for convenience.” 

Edulog has been providing school districts with bus routing services since 1977, but Nguyen-Bull said it was consumers who ultimately began to push for real-time GPS tracking about a decade ago. 

Numerous companies now offer such services for school buses, including in big urban districts like , which just launched its long-awaited tracker last week; and Los Angeles. The services, however, haven’t always lived up to the expectations of parents or school bus drivers, with both reporting accuracy concerns. The power of real-time information has also introduced new safety risks, Nguyen-Bull said. If the app says a bus is expected to arrive five minutes late, she said that “personal optimizers” will use that information to delay their trek to the bus stop. 

“That creates problems where kids are rushing across streets or they’re not being careful in how they approach the bus,” she said, adding that the issue is compounded in instances when the GPS information is inaccurate. “We’ve become so reliant on our phones that we don’t actually look up and see what the reality is.” 

Meanwhile, over the last year the federal government has placed a heightened emphasis on cybersecurity risks introduced to the education sector through third-party technology vendors like Edulog. In September, the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to sign a voluntary pledge and commit to building products with robust security protections. Companies that sign the pledge agree to “radical transparency” and to “take ownership of customer security outcomes.” 

In a December blog post, the federal cybersecurity agency noted that school districts should not be required to “bear the cybersecurity burden alone,” and advocated for shifting many responsibilities to vendors. 

“Cybersecurity issues facing K-12 could be much more effectively and cheaply dealt with earlier in the supply chain, by focusing on a relatively smaller number of linchpin companies serving very large numbers of students and educators instead of school district by school district, school by school,” the post noted. 

But Nguyen-Bull said her company was uninterested in signing the pledge, calling it meaningless without any clear cybersecurity standards. Yet she also balked at the idea of regulations that would set specific cybersecurity requirements. 

“We’re not just going to sign random pledges that ask for slightly different things if we don’t know if we can track those things,” she said. “As a small family-run business, we don’t have five compliance people tracking all of the different pledges and ensuring that we check all of the boxes.”

Sebree, of the cybersecurity firm Tenable, said that transparency about security lapses is key, telling The 74 in an email that vendors “have an ethical responsibility” to inform customers in a timely manner so they can make knowledgeable decisions. 

“Notifying their customers that a vulnerability had been discovered and fixed, even if no evidence of a breach was found, would have been the most transparent action here,” he said. “Customers deserve to know when their data has been at risk so they can make decisions in the future with all of the information in hand.” 

Louisville father Bramel said that he and other parents should also have been notified — either by the district or the company itself — about the extent that information had been exposed to preserve trust.

“When you’ve got to rely on this system to cover your kids and they can’t have open communication, what other issues are going on besides that issue?” Bramel asked. “I’m honestly shocked there aren’t lawsuits and stuff like that happening right now … because this is completely uncalled for.”

 sits near the heart of Louisville, KY, down the street from a community college, two big hospitals, a museum, and a short hop to the Jefferson County courthouse and the central business district. But take a different turn off the nearby Interstate and you see a far less prosperous Louisville, with homeless encampments, empty lots, public housing, and the flashing lights of police and ambulance sirens day and night.

Central, the alma mater of heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, has a mostly Black student body and 70 percent of its students are from low-income families. It’s had some tough knocks against it over its 150-year history, and it’s not where Rikaiya Long, now a junior, first thought about going after middle school. She was a high-achieving student, doing well in advanced classes. Many who knew her assumed she would head to , widely considered one of the best high schools in the state.

But Rikaiya, an aspiring lawyer, felt confident about choosing Central instead, where more than 60 percent of graduates go to college. “I wouldn’t put myself in a position to get a subpar education,” she says. Middle schoolers can apply to a high school in Louisville, and every year school representatives make their pitch to eighth graders, touting their school’s offerings. At one such session, Rikaiya learned that Central had a solid reputation for supporting its students while providing rigorous pathways toward their futures. “I knew I wanted to be in a legal profession,” says Rikaiya. Central offered a Law Magnet program with a sterling record. Its alumni, she found out, included attorneys, elected officials, and judges. Seven Law Magnet graduates were in law school in 2022. And that’s what Rikaiya wanted as well — to go to law school.

Pathways to career options

Not many eighth graders are as focused as Rikaiya. For too many teens, high school is little more than an annoying habit they must put up with until graduation. Beyond that, their goals are often vague. Some, like Rikaiya, have been steered to college, but chances are high that many teens haven’t received much guidance.

Some educators are changing this by giving every student an education that provides a solid direction — a pathway — after graduation. At Central, Magnet Coordinator Cynthia Eddings-King explains that students are encouraged early on to think beyond high school, and they’re given several pathway choices through the school’s magnet programs that lead from getting a diploma to getting a life.

Pathway programs combine academics with exposure to careers in specific fields.  include Innovation (STEM), Medical/Health Services, Teaching and Learning, Montessori, and, of course, Law and Government. Each pathway includes real-life experiences, such as job shadowing or internships, connections to community businesses and professionals, and in some fields, professional certification that can lead to a job right after graduation.

Teachers at Central also see part of their role as making sure youth of color realize all their options, explore them, and go for what they want. Shantel Reed, nursing pathway coordinator and a registered nurse, says she is thrilled to watch teens learn about different medical professions available to them. They return from visiting a hospital, she says, amazed at seeing jobs they didn’t even know existed—like a speech language pathologist checking patients’ swallowing function. “I can tell them all day, but when they are following someone all day, they get it. There are jobs they never imagined.”

School culture is part of its mission

While Central gets high marks for its magnet structure and curriculum, what seems to be the glue holding the pieces of the puzzle together is its school culture, where administrators, teachers, students, and staff all feel as if they have each other’s back. That was something new for Rikaiya.

“I’ve always been in (advanced) classes,” she says. “And I’ve been the only Black girl. At Central, I have classes where everyone looks like me. It’s an amazing feeling; I feel extremely comfortable.” She adds that this has created a more relaxed learning atmosphere for her. The academics are still rigorous, but the sense of being with family makes learning natural, she says.

Central was Louisville’s high school for Black students until 1956, when a school busing program began. After that initiative ended, Central, located in a Black neighborhood, reverted to a mostly Black student population. Today the school is 77 percent Black, 12 percent Hispanic, 7 percent white, and 4 percent other.

Principal Dr. Tameka Coleman is thrilled about that 7 percent. She sees Central’s culture having a positive effect on white kids, too. “These students will be the most well-versed, diverse kids because they have been able to garner an experience that their white counterparts will never have. They will see when an environment lacks diversity.”

Many of the other 93 percent, however, might experience culture shock in the other direction when they leave Central. At predominantly white institutions and workplaces, they won’t see as many Black and brown faces. They may wonder where they fit in.

Central will have given them one big advantage, however. They’re academically ready, says Coleman. “Our college partners are always so complimentary on how Central students come in with an edge,” Coleman says. The culture may be different, but the work is familiar because of the pathways program. The nursing students know how to draw blood. The law students are already dissecting cases and writing briefs. The engineering students are programming robotic animals. And Central’s vet students are doing things that many college students don’t learn until vet school – post grad, Coleman adds. “They can approach the work unapologetically and unafraid.”

Sometimes, the pathway changes

The culture of Central is supportive, but the schoolwork obviously has an impact. Assignments in all of the programs are often multilayered, for instance, with multimedia documentation and team presentations. Students meet and learn from local, practicing professionals. Students in every program are out in the community, participating in city forums, mentoring and teaching elementary school children, shadowing medical professionals at the hospital, or working at dental, vet, or law offices.

Rikaiya’s law magnet teacher (and magnet coordinator), Joe Gutmann, is a former prosecutor, “with a lot of experience and a lot of stories,” says Rikaiya. The Law Magnet has a double-sized classroom, half of which is decked out as a courtroom to allow students to practice what they learn. After first seeing it in eighth grade, Rikaiya has become the one presenting in it. The junior classes’ mentors/student teachers from University of Louisville’s Brandeis School of Law sat on the bench listening to oral arguments from the briefs each student had written. The assignment regarded “strict liability,” and the case revolved around a Tiger King incident. “The judges ask a lot of questions, and you’re defending your side. It’s not a debate, but it’s very intense. It makes you think on the spot,” says Rikaiya, who adds enthusiastically that she enjoyed the presentation, and, at least for a while, the rest of her law studies, too. The curriculum’s practical, participatory education about law, democracy, and human rights also matched one of Central’s key principles, social justice, something Rikaiya feels strongly about.

Despite all that, she realized something during her sophomore year: “Law didn’t grab my attention like I thought it would.” That was during the pandemic, when the campus was closed and lawyer-wannabes had to figure out what practicing law meant over Zoom. “I was still interested in the business aspect of things; I was still looking at a corporate career, but no longer a law job,” she says. Rikaiya made the decision to change her intended college major. Through studying various law specialties, she came across public relations. “I started to get to know what they actually do, and I kind of fell in love with the idea of becoming a public relations specialist.”

But now what? Just as at the end of eighth grade, she faced another big choice. Back then, she had successfully become one of a class of 350 accepted to Central, applying with the Law Magnet in mind. She’d spent the requisite first semester learning about all of Central’s magnets before joining Law and Government. Once you’re in a magnet, it’s a commitment. The curriculum from semester to semester, and year to year, is linked to your pathway. Changing magnets, though not impossible, would require a lot of catching up on classes and adjusting.

Another option, of course, was to change schools. Rikaiya never considered that. Ultimately, she decided it just wasn’t necessary. Her core academic classes would still provide the rigor she needs, and the skills taught in the law magnet would not go to waste. “You don’t have to be a lawyer just because you’re interested in law. You can use your law degree for anything,” Rikaiya says. She is reminded that Gutmann had often told them that the law touches everything: If there are regulations, policies, and contracts, the law is involved. One of the big advantages of pathways over older, more traditional vocational programs is that they are coupled with academics strong enough to help a student into college. Even if the first pathway a student takes isn’t what she envisioned, she can find another to her liking.

Her journey continues

Despite her qualms about practicing law, Rikaiya was elected president of the Law Magnet and of Central High School’s junior class. The people in her magnet are like family and those in the other magnets are like neighbors — and Rikaiya is the type of young woman to knock on a neighbor’s door and give them cookies. She wants to keep that feeling of family, community, and belonging alive. “I like to intermix with people and have them meet each other, too. I connect people whenever I can.”

That is what others have done for her. When she changed her career goals, her teachers and counselor were there to help her. For college, Rikaiya is applying to Howard University, Florida A&M University, and Xavier University of Louisiana — all historically Black institutions with public relations programs. The teacher of her favorite class has already put her in touch with a Howard graduate working in the field.

It’s clear to Rikaiya that Central is committed to successful pathways for everybody, and that high school graduation isn’t the end of a journey, but just the beginning. She says learning now that law wasn’t what she thought it would be was the best thing. “I definitely saved myself some money!” she says, thinking of paying for a year or two of college and then changing her mind and major. “That’s why I like the career magnets; they help you really figure out what you like and what you want to do.”