Woke Washington State has produced a bumper crop of public school malfeasance.

Just yesterday, a Longview public school bus driver who transported 90 kids in two trips was credibly reported to be driving like a drunk — weaving, running red lights, and stinking of alcohol — according to the terrified schoolchildren who were stuck on that bus without choice, with one of them calling 911.  The cops eventually showed up, found the driver, smelled the alcohol, and made an arrest.  The school itself put the driver on paid leave.  According to WTSP:

LONGVIEW, Wash. — A young student called 911 to report that his Longview Public Schools driver was drunk and had run red lights.

Police later arrested the driver, Catherine Maccarone, 48, for driving under the influence in  the September 12th incident and two counts of reckless endangerment. She drove twice, once transporting high school students and also grade schoolers.

Not to be outdone, a Bellingham public school stuck an autistic boy who needed a quiet setting into a smelly school bathroom, along with his desk and a nap mat on the bathroom floor.  According to Newsweek (hat tip: Issues & Insights):

Washington middle school has been criticized for allegedly planning to seat a student with autism and an auto-immune disorder inside a bathroom.

Danielle Goodwin said her sixth-grade son Lucas, 11, needs a quiet environment to study as his condition can be triggered by loud noises.

The kid's mom found out about it, toured the place, and said the place stank with bathroom smells, which not only was gross in itself, but was worse for her kid because he had an additional condition that made him sensitive to germs.  In the past, the child had been placed in the library for quiet time, now he got the toilet room.  The school in its press release after the matter broke said they placed highest priority on the needs of their kids and never used that combination bathroom-study room at all (although the photos seemed to tell a different story).  Oh.

Since the news of both appalling events broke on the same day, it makes one wonder what's going on in that school system.  The schools themselves are located on opposite north-south ends of the state, and school boards are run independently, but there is one central state authority.  So maybe it's all just the wildest of coincidences that two such child-hostile events could occur on the same day.

But more likely, there are some common threads.  Washington State is a near-one-party blue state, and that means a woke culture has taken hold.  One would look to affirmative action policies in hiring, perhaps convict hiring, or possibly blue crony hiring, to explain why that bus driver got hired.  More likely still, a powerful union may have ensured that the driver stayed hired.  One could also look to an absence of educational competition and an entitled, bloated, administrative elite (over in the library, which kept the kid out) in the Bellingham case, which might have made the wokesters at that school confident they could do anything they wanted with nobody able to say a thing.  And quite likely, statewide woke culture feeds the idea that educrats know best, so they don't get criticized or held accountable.  In solid blue states, new ideas don't get through.

The bottom line is that the public schools are miserable failures and incidents like these are sure to cut public support for them, as Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit noted in his book "The New School," describing how public support is falling for public education and the public is fleeing.  Public support is bound to fall as excesses mount, bureaucracies bloat rises and wokeness takes hold.  Longview spends about $12,000 per student, and less than 40% can pass math standards.  Bellingham is just slightly better.  The excesses of the blue culture permit incidents like these two Washington incidents, made known only because there is new technology such as cell phones and internet, and because kids can now flee to online schools and charter schools.  Accoording to Reynolds's book blurb:

For decades now, America has been investing ever-growing fortunes into its K-12 education system in exchange for steadily worse results. Public schools haven't changed much from the late 19th century industrial model and as a result young Americans are left increasingly unprepared for a competitive global economy. At the same time, Americans are spending more than they can afford on higher education, driven by the kind of cheap credit that fueled the housing bubble. With college graduates unable to secure employment or pay off student loans, the real-world value of a traditional college education is in question.

In The New School, Glenn Harlan Reynolds explains how parents, students and educators can, and must, reclaim and remake American education. Already, Reynolds explains, many Americans are abandoning traditional education for new models. Many are going to charter schools or private schools, but others are going another step beyond and making the leap to online education — over 1.8 million K-12 students already.

One can't help thinking these incidents in blue Washington might just be plot points on that very route against public schools downward.

Image credit: Mr. Election via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.