Students returning to a Kentucky middle school this year learned something surprising on their first day of class: They don’t live in Kentucky.
Apparently, they live in “Venecky.”
The bizarre geography lesson appeared in student agendas distributed at Farnsley Middle School, part of Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville. A U.S. map in the planner transformed Kentucky into “Venecky,” Louisiana into “Lookoong,” Alabama into “Alotome,” Illinois into “Vitoiis” and South Carolina into “Sorth Cuanto.”
The mistakes didn’t stop at state lines. The agendas also contained a distorted periodic table, unreadable phases of the moon and other garbled educational material that parents suspect may have been created using artificial intelligence.
JCPS has not confirmed whether AI was used or identified who produced the agendas.
It took a student just one day to notice.
“Mom, did you know that we live in Venecky?” Stacey Morris recalled her son joking after school, according to Louisville’s WDRB.
Morris contacted the school about the errors. Administrators later warned teachers there were a “LOT of mistakes” on pages 19 through 36 and instructed students to tear the pages out of their planners before taking them home.
For parents, however, the problem goes beyond bad geography. Families pay a $10 annual instructional fee for the agendas. “Someone did not look at what they were handing out to the students,” Morris told WDRB.
The mishap also comes at an awkward moment for Kentucky’s largest school district.
A nearly 500-page special examination released by Kentucky State Auditor Allison Ball in June raised broader concerns about JCPS’s management and finances. The audit found the district lacked a cohesive strategic plan, had begun spending more than it brought in despite receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in federal COVID relief and suffered from a workplace culture in which employees reported fear of retaliation.
The report also identified gaps in financial and budgeting knowledge among district leaders and school board members.
New Superintendent Brian Yearwood, who took over JCPS last year, has said the district is taking the findings seriously and called the audit an opportunity to strengthen the system. Start your day with essential news from Salon. Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.
Against problems of that scale, a $10 student planner is a tiny expense. But for families already questioning how their school district is managed, an educational resource riddled with errors obvious enough for a middle schooler to catch on his first day has become another highly visible example of failed oversight.
Whether artificial intelligence created the mangled pages remains unanswered.
The students, at least, appear to have learned one useful lesson from them: Always check the source — even when the adults hand it to you.