Coral Glades High School. | Location: TAMARAC, Florida, USA. Photo courtesy of Kentucky Lantern
By MICHAEL CRIMMINS
Glasgow News 1
Based on a recently passed state senate bill, Kentucky lawmakers are continuing their efforts to privatize the commonwealth’s education system.
Senate Bill 207, that was passed despite Governor Andy Beshear’s veto, allows local schools to apply for a three-year waiver from “the requirements of an administrative regulation promulgated by the state board or from a statute over which the state board has authority to enforce.”
Local school boards can also request that the “school or program that is the subject of the [waiver] request [be identified] as a school of innovation,” which grants them “a waiver from all statutes and administrative regulations that would prevent the district from entering into an agreement with an education service provider to assist in the management and operation of the school or program.”
Kentucky Senator Stephen West said he proposed the bill, now law, after Amendment 2 failed at the ballot box. Amendment 2 would have amended the commonwealth’s constitution to allow public funds to go to private institutions. All of Kentucky’s 120 counties voted against the amendment, according to outside reporting. In Barren County, 67 percent of voters voted “no” on the amendment.
West said this provision is “based on a South Carolina law and allows local school boards to seek waivers from the Kentucky Board of Education to be exempted from certain state laws or regulations for schools that ‘will improve operations or student academic achievement,'” according to the Kentucky Lantern.
“Everywhere you look in your life, choice is almost always better,” West said to the Kentucky Lantern. “And so whether it’s the car you drive or the movie you go to or whatever, we demand choices. But for some reason in K-12, it’s been pretty stagnant, and there’s a lack of choice.”
Democrats on the Budget Subcommittee on Education expressed skepticism with Representative George Brown Jr. commenting that he was concerned about the “theory to practice” of the new law.
“I think that we have to be concerned about…what actually will happen in terms of the children and their learning, and what happens as a result of that,” Brown said. “Some parents don’t have the financial resources, but they do want what’s best for their children, and I think that is what we have with the Constitution.”
Democratic Representative Tina Bojanowski, a public elementary school teacher, asked that with the legislation allowing Kentucky to “subcontract the management of a specific school to an outside entity” if that is “exactly what a charter school is.”
West answered “yes,” but a main difference would be “the initiation of the request by the local district,” giving the public school district “more control” than under previously passed charter school legislation, according to the Kentucky Lantern.
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