Bluegrass Beacon: Will Kentucky shut down a school serving thousands of students?

By Jim Waters

Accountability for academic performance is suddenly all the rage among Kentucky’s anti-education-freedom bureaucrats and politicians, but only because it involves a new program offering parents a choice for their children outside the traditional K-12 public school system.

Case in point: Rural Breckinridge County’s Cloverport Independent School District, where 275 students attend brick-and-mortar schools, has started the Kentucky Virtual Academy (KVA). More than 3,000 students statewide – including about 800 from the Jefferson County Public School District, Kentucky’s largest – are enrolled in the online academy in only its second year, more than double the school’s enrollment in 2023-24.

In December, the Kentucky Board of Education adopted a new regulation which, if implemented, will essentially shut down KVA, denying thousands of students an alternative their families believe is a better educational fit. 

The board’s action is mostly about appeasing overpaid and parent-choice-hostile bureaucrats who run Kentucky’s local school systems and who loathe the fact that state education dollars leave their districts and follow students to the KVA. 

State senators deserve kudos for taking action to try and keep thousands of families from being denied the KVA option by passing a bill that bars the state from cutting funding or capping virtual schools’ enrollment for three years.

The Senate’s version of House Bill 241 reinforces what should be the first priority of our schools – educating students. It recognizes the importance of having a system with the flexibility and innovation to provide that education regardless of obstacles like the weather or a pandemic. 

It’s likely that some – if not several – of those hundreds of former JCPS students snared in a COVID-shutdown fiasco which occurred in Louisville are now enrolled in KVA with hopes of finally making up at least some of the ground they lost.

Most important, it gives parents an option for students statewide trapped in failing schools without options. 

Perhaps the richest irony in the debate over the KVA is that Kentucky’s public education establishment and its media cronies are suddenly expressing grave concerns about low test scores. 

Such concern seems to have grown exponentially since the nearly across-the-board failure of a majority of Kentucky’s public school students to reach math and reading proficiency was hardly even an afterthought in the education establishment’s narrative during last year’s school-choice amendment campaign. 

Regarding the new KVA, any competent educator knows it takes time for new educational ventures to achieve healthy results. This is certainly true for publicly funded, independently run schools – like public charter schools – which a growing mountain of research indicates begin to outperform traditional public schools after three years. 

New public charter schools are generally given five years before their performance can be fairly evaluated. The KVA should also be given sufficient time to demonstrate its effectiveness, which the current version of HB 241 does. 

Many parents choose an alternative because their children aren’t succeeding in school. This means many children enter the new school already behind; it takes time for them to catch up. 

HB 241 as passed by the Senate merges a bill providing districts hit hard by weather closures five calamity days that don’t need to be made up with Senate Bill 268, sponsored by Sen. Aaron Reed, R-Shelbyville, which bars the state from cutting funding or capping virtual schools’ enrollment for three years.

Ironically, the original House bill would let Kentucky’s public school districts off the hook because of missed weather days when students in virtual schools – which the Senate legislation protects – can attend school no matter the weather conditions. 

This merging of bills is a distasteful aspect of legislative activity, which is why the process is often compared to “sausage making.”  However, such a procedure is occasionally necessary, especially when the KDE attempts to regulate a public school out of existence just because it’s different and sends thousands of children and their families scrambling for a new school. 

Our state’s K-12 establishment is infected with extreme opposition to educational freedom, causing it to obsessively seek to deny parents statewide an opportunity like the Cloverport academy. The Senate’s merged version of the bill, which now returns to the House for consideration, offers a cure for this ailment. 

Passing the merged bill achieves the goal of both original bills: it relieves districts hit hard by weather of five make-up days and protects the KVA option for thousands of students. 

Jim Waters is president of the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, Kentucky’s free-market think tank. Read previous columns at www.bipps.org. Reach him at jwaters@freedomkentucky.com and @bipps on Twitter.