Students Leading Roadway Overhaul Fatigued Amid Teacher Shortage
by David Horowitz
Leandra Heimer, 15, can’t remember her last full night of sleep.
Heimer attends classes at the IMPACT Center. She’s on a school sports team; she repairs the Bowling Green-Warren County Unified Government defunct autonomous buses at the IMPACT Center; and, these past two years, the student project leader (SPL) has spearheaded design and engineering for the Warren County Roadway Renewal project (WCRR).
The Bowling Green-Warren County Unified School District’s 100 SPLs oversee WCRR contributions from high schoolers, each managing a student cohort.
The SPLs consult local contractors and higher education researchers to ensure best practices. They guide their cohorts in collecting hyperlocal feedback from their respective neighborhoods via AI-driven survey tech and legwork to collect and check feedback in their respective neighborhoods. And – alongside researchers at Southcentral Kentucky Community & Technical College and Western Kentucky University, and agencies regionwide – they review AI analyses of the data and distill hyperlocal findings weekly for the Unified Government Youth Council.
If lucky, their days end at 8 p.m., which is when homework begins, Heimer and other SPLs said.
Altogether, these partnerships provide mounds of industry experience, enabling SPLs to supply critical leadership and hyperlocal oversight that will shape the county’s transportation in the decades to come. Last year’s graduating SPLs had a 20% higher job attainment rate in their desired field than the average student going into that field, a district survey found last year.
But, on the flipside, a Daily News survey taken by all SPLs show that the WCRR, on average, consumes more than 15 hours a week outside of classes. About 80% reported “consistently los(ing) sleep due to SPL-related contributions” to WCRR. And, 92% of SPLs indicated one need far above all else: more teachers to balance the workload. Interviews with 30 SPLs overwhelmingly reaffirmed these results.
“Innovation and leadership have become central to who I am, and I love it, and I love the opportunities we have to work beside so many community partners — but I never wanted it to be everything,” Heimer said. “It wouldn’t if we had adequate support. But we don’t.”
When local officials first conceived the idea of WCRR in 2047, neighborhood leaders and other advocates organized regular local demonstrations. The top demand: a community input process superior to the one used when the Unified Government approved autonomous electric shuttles — one that accounts for hyperlocal needs.
The WCRR Planning and Execution Committee, granted authority and funds by the Unified Government’s policymaking body to plan and execute the project, has since approved a host of information-gathering measures that committee members argue show improvements.
The Unified Government has upgraded its surveying software. It and the committee has since partnered with the Daily News to publish the survey QR code and the previous week’s results by the week.
And, most pertinently, the county collaborated with area schools — enabling students to collect feedback on a hyperlocal level for the project.
SPLs make this possible — each guiding dozens of students at their respective area school by ensuring their input is validated, normalized, summarized and submitted to the committee’s Review Subcommittee.
The average area student working on the project has slept 13% less since the project kicked off, according to 2048-49 school year surveys from local schools’ DeepSeek-based student-therapy AI.
But it’s far worse for the 100 SPLs, who take dual roles as student and teacher.
In a second Daily News survey taken by all SPLs, 75% of survey-takers reported that their ability to work effectively and get proper sleep is “substantially impacted” by the national state-of-emergency teacher crisis. The average leader reported getting under six hours of sleep, compared to the average of seven for non-SPLs reported by last school year’s student-therapy survey. And, all the leaders attributed the losses to “a substantial increase in responsibilities that would normally be taken upon by teachers.”
Bobby Sloan, a New Jennings Creek student, summed up: “I go to sleep thinking about WCRR. I wake up thinking about WCRR. Everything in between: WCRR.”
Amid the U.S. teacher shortage crisis, gradual increases in public education funding haven’t compensated for a dearth of federal grants. And so, school communities — administrators, teachers, staff, students and parents and guardians — must increasingly do more with less.
It’s no indictment of local schools: Compared to national averages, all area schools have retained above-average scores over the past three years in state testing and teacher-to-student ratios, according to recent years’ Kentucky Department of Education surveys.
Bowling Green-Warren County Unified Schools have long credited these wins to local partnerships, “authentic project” curricula and the now-districtwide IMPACT Center virtual reality (VR) initiative. The latter has increasingly enabled high school students to attend classes and collaborate on authentic projects through inter-school partnerships.
The General Assembly has invested in educational initiatives to enhance VR school district partnerships with businesses, chambers of commerce and other agencies across the state. In response to 2030 results from state surveys of residents, the legislators have also bolstered the state’s annual investment in its foundational program for funding K-12 education, Support Education Excellence in Kentucky (SEEK), over the past two decades.
Despite these strides in K-12 supports and gradual increases in funding, schools are still getting less from SEEK funding for educators and support staff overall than they were in 2008 when accounting for inflation.
The region has made strides in public transportation through a fleet of eco-friendly, autonomous buses on regular routes, and this project is the Unified Government’s means of replicating those efforts across its perimeter: Judge-Executive Tim Love announced the roadway project in 2047 to reduce traffic and enhance safety by overhauling county roadways and running the local government’s own autonomous bus program to better facilitate public transportation.
Warren County’s growth, to some 250,000 residents, has made the area a vital economic hub — but it’s also come with an average morning school bus trip of one and a half hours and an average morning work commute of 40 minutes for drivers.
These three factors prompted the WCRR, Love said.
Despite obstacles in funding and staffing, the Bowling Green area may be as well-positioned as any area to pull off the project.
The IMPACT Center educational model has increasingly tied together leadership and innovation to meet community needs, becoming an international model for hands-on, entrepreneurial training and skills acquisition, especially in the realm of newer tech.
An IMPACT Center-WKU partnership developed the local Skills Hub, which trains workers in vibrant enterprises such as robotics repair and AI ethics. Area schools, in partnership with SKyCTC, have contributed substantially to research surrounding pedestrian walkways and concerning stormwater in the schools’ respective neighborhoods. And tackling such authentic projects, overall, have become common — as each area school has completed at least eight annually through the student workgroup framework, which assigns a group of students two tasks every semester.
Still, the WCRR has become an exceptional task for students.
The Unified Government oversees bigger-picture planning and facilitation with consultants and contractors alongside researchers from WKU. Implementation and information-gathering have largely fallen upon school administrators, where high school students districtwide have conducted research in partnership with WKU and SKYCTC — a herculean sum of work exacerbated by the district’s 50-to-1 student-to-teacher ratio (better than the national average of 70-to-1).
As a result, much has fallen on students — especially SPLs — whom students are largely turning to for guidance where they would ideally consult teachers, according to most SPLs surveyed.
Jamal Williams, a junior SPL, said that whereas he used to see friends weekly, hangouts have become sparse since he became a student leader for the WCRR. His grades for courses unrelated to WCRR have also dipped since becoming involved in the project.
“I love my classmates and the work we can do together, but I miss my friends at school,” Williams said.
Steph Singer, a senior WCRR leader at Summer Heights High, said she’s started to crack under the pressure.
“We use AI; we use VR; we innovate; we lead; we use all that we have — but we need teachers,” Singer said. “We do all these things to compensate for a lack of resources, and it’s never enough.”
Kenan Mandrapa, a senior who leads WCRR at Grace Keller High, has seen his overall grade drop. Anxiety, he added, is consistent.
“I don’t want to spend every waking moment of my day leading this project,” Mandrapa said. “But it’s such a real-world problem. There are lives at stake, and — despite the partnerships — we don’t have enough adults in the room.
Meanwhile, one wrong call can make me responsible for someone’s injury – or worse. It’s an opportunity to lead – but also, there’s desperation. And it’s fallen on us kids.”
Mary Heimer, the mother of Leandra Heimer – the 15-year-old who’s lost sleep – summed up her feelings about the circumstances to the Daily News: “Of course, I’m proud of her,” Mary Heimer said about her child. “But I also want her to enjoy being a kid.”
