‘It’s a mess.’ How KY legislature helped fuel chaotic start to school. And how to fix it.
Beware of the law of unintended consequences when you’re passing laws.
Last winter, Kentucky’s GOP legislators were really mad at the teacher unions in Lexington and Louisville, who expressed concern about going back to in-person teaching. So they wrote up House Bill 208, which not only required butts in seats but greatly limited Non-Traditional Instruction days aimed at getting curriculum to kids on snow days or when you’re in the middle of a crushing pandemic. Of course by March, nearly all the schools were back and there was general consensus on both sides of the political aisle that in-person school was best for kids, but the die was cast.
Only, whoops! The pandemic is back, sweeping through rural and conservative parts of Kentucky, forcing schools to shut down and for school superintendents to beg for relief. Thanks to HB 208, schools might have to make up those days that they’re shut instead of using everything we learned about online instruction last year to good effect. In addition, they could lose funding because of closed days.
Thanks to the tireless reporting of Valarie Honeycutt Spears, we know that rural superintendents are also worried about the winter months, when they use NTI days to fill in learning when schools are closed because of snow and ice.
“Financially we won’t be able to survive for a small school district in eastern Kentucky,” Owsley County Superintendent Tim Bobrowski told her, referring to the fact that schools get money based on average daily attendance.
“We would be forced to use our NTI days which makes me real nervous when we get into the winter months because I only have a few to use. I’m going to be pressed against making that decision so early. We just hope somewhere down the line the legislature and governor will get on the same page and give us some autonomy to run our schools the way we feel like we can run them the best,” he said.
The ironic thing is that the two districts the Legislature was aiming at may be able to stay open the longest because they have higher vaccination rates in their communities. In Lexington, for example, they’re looking at new initiatives, like “test and stay” that would provide more immediate testing on school sites so kids could avoid quarantine if they are negative.
“It’s a mess,” said state Rep. Tina Bojanowski, D-Louisville, who is a Jefferson County teacher. She was a sponsor of HB 208 because it was vetted through the Kentucky Department of Education, but is worried about the real-life effects. “The same people who were grumbling about how everyone needs to be back in school are also saying everyone shouldn’t wear masks.”
In July, the bill’s main sponsor, House Education Committee Chairwoman Regina Huff, R-Williamsburg, posted, then deleted a tweet comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci to cult leader Jim Jones of the Jonestown Massacre. She said it was because mandates are evil. “Mandates have outcomes that can be detrimental,” she told WKYT. It’s true and her bill is showing us why.
What’s so frustrating is that it didn’t have to be this way. First, Republican legislators could stop thinking up ways to punish public schools and think of ways to help them instead. Then they could have taken the virus seriously instead of playing petty politics with it, casting doubt on vaccines and rejecting the use of masks.
That has only recently changed with Republicans more openly endorsing the vaccine, including Senate President Robert Stivers, who, eight months after the vaccine was introduced, decided he should encourage it. With free pizza. His home district, by the way, has the highest COVID incidence in the state at 245 per 100,000 people. Only 32 percent of the population is vaccinated.
Clay Superintendent William Sexton said the high rate is certainly affecting Clay schools although they’ve stayed open so far.
“We’re concerned because a lot of kids are going to home school and we don’t have a virtual option right now,” he said. “Virtual was not really successful but it was better than nothing. In-person is the best option if we can do that, we’re trying to do extra cleaning, social distancing in the classrooms, we’re wearing masks to cut down on transmission.”
Relief could come from the Legislature, if Beshear called a special session focused on COVID, or in January, when lawmakers return for a regular session, said KDE General Counsel Todd Allen. Superintendents around the state have been contacting legislators.
Beshear said this week that Kentucky’s current numbers would have led him to a statewide mask mandate, but that’s been taken off the table by the Legislature. So here we are, our children held hostage to misinformation and conspiracy, watching our hospitals fill up and our schools close down.
“All of this is based on encouraging people to do something rather than have mandates because of the political blowback about liberty and freedom,” Bojanowski said. “Where did we lose our sense of being part of a shared community reaching for the common good?”
