Legislators pass disastrous school bill
Yesterday, a majority of legislators in the Kentucky Senate voted to pass House Bill 208. This bill, which has already passed the House and is likely to soon become law, would require a minimum of two days of in-person instruction for Kentucky’s elementary and secondary students, four days of instruction overall and could allow districts to continue a hybrid plan in the 2021-22 school year.
The Bluegrass Institute and grassroots organizations like Let Them Learn worked to encourage legislators to improve the original bill which would have allowed districts to continue all virtual school through the remainder of this school year as well as the 2021-22 term. However, the current bill is still greatly lacking and problematic.
The bill may apply to the 2021-22 school year as well
Despite denial by HB 208’s primary sponsor that this bill could affect the next school year, Section 2 of the bill reads:
Notwithstanding any other statute or administrative regulation to the contrary, a school district seeking approval by the commissioner for a nontraditional instruction plan for the 2021-2022 school year must submit the plan within the district's Comprehensive District Improvement Plan by May 1, 2021. The plan and number of days shall be subject to approval by the commissioner of education.
Hence, this text allows school districts the ability to continue hybrid learning for the entirety of the next school year despite vaccination expansion and an overall expected decrease in COVID-19 cases.
This passage alone should have been enough for Frankfort legislators to vote down the bill.
It’s unconstitutional
Kentucky’s Constitution reads: “The General Assembly shall, by appropriate legislation, provide for an efficient system of common schools throughout the State.” In the landmark 1989 Rose v. Council for Better Education case, the Kentucky Supreme Court interpreted “efficient” to mean that the educational system must be “adequate, uniform and unitary.”
The current school structure across the commonwealth is anything but “adequate, uniform and unitary.” Compare Laurel County Public Schools (LCPS) which began offering in-person classes in September to that of Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) that have yet to return in-person in nearly a year.
Nationwide studies show that the less in-person instruction a district offers, the more significant amount of learning is lost with students, especially for low-income and minority populations. Why should students in JCPS not be given the same opportunities for academic learning as those in LCPS?
Despite JCPS’ refusal to open the doors to students, the YMCA runs a program for public school children out of those same public schools 5-days a week. But instead of experiencing traditional learning at their schools with teachers there to provide instruction, parents are paying YMCA staff to babysit their children while students sit in front of computers all day.
Why would so many Frankfort legislators think it’s safe for the YMCA to open public schools five days a week, but not the school districts?
*Watch: Sen. Adrienne Southworth, R-Lawrenceburg, references both the KY Constitution and the KY Supreme Court ruling in her decision to vote ‘no.’
It continues to suspend important Kentucky law
Despite many references during yesterday’s Senate debate on the need for “local control,” current Kentucky law doesn’t allow school districts to choose how many days students are in the classroom.
Kentucky law requires “not less than one hundred seventy (170) student attendance days.” Why? Because in-person is how students learn best.
In fact, school districts have only had the ability to choose how many, and whether or not to have, in-person instruction days due to an executive order issued by Gov. Beshear suspending the instruction requirements because of the state of emergency. Yet the General Assembly has decided to continue this mistake at the expense of our student population.
Students aren’t learning
As referenced above, there’s no substitute for in-person learning and large increases in loss of learning have been shown for students who are virtual or hybrid. Take, for example, Kentucky’s largest school district, JCPS, which has failed to have any in-person instruction days since March 2020.
According to a WDRB report, failing grades the first six weeks of the 2020-21 school year were up 120.3% for high school students and 388% for middle school students over the previous school year while elementary school failing grades grew by 43%.
According to JCPS superintendent Dr. Marty Pollio, “We are going to have to have a two- or three-year plan to recover all the lost learning for our students,” referencing students who WDRB says “have fallen through the virtual cracks.”
The health effects to students are detrimental
Research overwhelmingly attributes growing mental health issues in our student population to the isolation many students face in the virtual learning world that ignores the importance of peer interaction for positive mental health.
Depression, anxiety, insomnia and suicidal thoughts have increased in secondary students since the onset of the pandemic. Mental health-related emergency room visits for these students were up 31% just in the first seven months of the pandemic. Suicide is now the second-leading cause of death among adolescents compared to the 10th-leading cause of death before tghe COVID-19 pandemic.
According to an NBC News report, “The massive displacement from school — not to mention mounting evidence that kids and their parents are increasingly experiencing depression, anxiety and trauma during the pandemic — is what has experts comparing the children of the pandemic to kids who’ve survived natural disasters."
Yesterday, many of our Frankfort legislators ignored this reality, refusing to balance students’ mental health with the comparatively minimal effect of the coronavirus on adolescents.
Conclusion
The CDC has urged schools to reopen for students. School districts across the state have prioritized COVID vaccinations for teachers. The Kentucky Constitution demands students have access to adequate and uniform education. And, Kentucky law codifies the need for in-person learning.
Students cannot continue to take a backseat to the political pressure of teachers’ unions. It's time to re-open our schools and use our education dollars to educate our children.