education

The first monument honoring a woman is headed to the Kentucky State Capitol.  

Lieutenant Governor Jacqueline Coleman announced this week that a statue of Barren County native Nettie Depp will be unveiled in August 2021.

Depp was a pioneer in education as a teacher and principal.  She was also elected school superintendent in 1913, seven years before women earned full voting rights.  

“A failure to observe women in places of honor narrows the vision of our youth and reveals a lack of understanding of American history regarding women’s work, sacrifice, and the immeasurable and timeless contribution to society’s advancement," stated Coleman.

Not only will Tennessee now track the cases of COVID-19 in schools across the state, but it is expected to make the information public.

The latest transparency reversal from Gov. Bill Lee’s administration was announced Tuesday.

Lee told reporters the state is working on a plan to make the information public while protecting the privacy of teachers and students. The details, however, are still unclear.

“We will give you a plan within a week of what information it is that we are going to provide, with the intent of being more transparent so that communities know what’s happening in schools with regard to COVID,” Lee said.

Sen. Max Wise (R-Campbellsville) and former education commissioner Wayne Lewis are calling on the federal government to help expand internet access to all Kentucky students.

“This is not something that states, particularly states like Kentucky, are going to be able to take on all on their own,” Lewis said Monday during a press conference hosted the Walton Family Foundation.

Lewis is serving as the dean of Belmont University school of education in Nashville, after being forced out of his position as education commissioner in December.

Wise, who chairs the state senate’s education committee, said many families struggled in the spring to get online when schools moved to nontraditional instruction, or NTI.

In March, as the state hunkered down for a pandemic, Kentucky schools launched one of their largest educational experiments ever: remote learning for every child.

It was an unprecedented challenge requiring unprecedented creativity. To reach their students, educators made phone calls and left voicemails, wrote text messages and emails, led Zoom sessions and Google Hangouts, and when all else failed, some made old-fashioned home visits. 

State data would suggest that around 90% of Kentucky students participated in this non-traditional instruction, or NTI, a state program for school districts to continue teaching when classes would otherwise be canceled.

The Kentucky Board of Education has named Jason Glass as commissioner of education, the state’s top K-12 education official. As commissioner, Glass will lead the 1,000 employees at the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE), and oversee the state’s public schools, which serve 648,000 students.

“I’m so incredibly grateful for this opportunity to serve the Commonwealth, and I’m excited to embark on this effort to improve the future for all of Kentucky’s children,” Glass said to the board during a special meeting Friday.

“Our world has become faster, more globally interconnected, more competitive — and these things are not slowing down — they are accelerating,” Glass said. “We have to adapt our education system so that we prepare our students to meet those challenges.”

State officials have released guidelines on reopening schools in the fall amid the coronavirus pandemic. The guidance includes requirements, as well as recommended “best practices,” for schools on social distancing, mask-wearing, cleaning and other measures.

“Necessary does not always equal easy,” Kentucky’s interim education commissioner Kevin Brown said during Gov. Andy Beshear’s daily briefing.

“The expectations that we’re providing today for schools and how to reopen them safely, reduce the risk, that is not easy,” Brown said. “But they are certainly necessary.”

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought by several former members of the Kentucky Board of Education who claimed Gov. Andy Beshear violated their constitutional rights when he ousted them shortly after taking office in December. District Judge Gregory Van Tatenhove dismissed the case Wednesday, ruling that, “the Court finds the Governor’s actions are not contrary to federal law.”

The former board members and their attorney, Steve Megerle, could not be reached for comment by our deadline. But the decision could be appealed to a higher court.

Protests across the state and the country against police brutality and structural racism have the attention of Kentucky education officials, including Ky. Lt Gov. Jacqueline Coleman. At Wednesday’s Kentucky Board of Education meeting, Coleman put forward several proposals, including statewide implicit bias training for teachers.

“I feel public education was made to meet the moment,” Coleman said, who is also the secretary of the Education and Workforce Development Cabinet.

“My first proposal is for the Department of Education to partner with schools across Kentucky to develop and implement a very needed implicit bias training for faculties across the across our communities,” she said.

The president of Western Kentucky University says the school will host students back on campus this fall.

The university suspended in-person classes and sent most students home from on-campus housing midway through the current spring semester as part of its COVID-19 response plan.

Speaking with the school's staff senate this week, WKU President Timothy Caboni said, while the school does plan to resume in-person instruction, any return to the hill will take place based on meeting benchmarks from the federal and state government, as well as the Centers for Disease Control.

The Tennessee Education Savings Account law — Gov. Bill Lee’s school voucher initiative — was declared unconstitutional on Monday evening by a Nashville chancellor.

At the center of the lawsuit, brought by Davidson and Shelby counties against the Tennessee Department of Education, was the interpretation of the state constitution’s Home Rule Amendment. The plaintiffs claimed that the school voucher law was unconstitutional because it singled out two counties without their consent.

Chris Wood, an attorney for the plaintiffs, celebrated the decision.