The first day of school was “the last straw” for a dozen Kentucky Republican lawmakers.
A busing fiasco that left kids stranded and parents panicked on the first day of school last year led to a week of canceled classes and a year of public concern about the district’s inability to transport students to schools.
To the lawmakers, it was an “epic failure” that proved the district of around 95,000 students and 150 schools is “too big to properly manage,” they said in an August letter to residents in Jefferson County.
“Yesterday’s debacle must be the catalyst for change,” they said.
The lawmakers pledged in the letter to form a commission to “evaluate splitting up JCPS.” And they did just that, forming the Efficient and Effective District Governance Task Force during this year’s General Assembly. The group’s aim is to examine the potential impacts of restructuring JCPS.
JCPS was formed in 1975, when a federal judge ordered the largely white county school system to merge with the more diverse city school system.
The task force met for the first time this week.
This is not the first time lawmakers have proposed breaking up JCPS. The district has long drawn the ire of Republicans in Frankfort who have criticized low test scores, superintendent pay and school security.
But the creation of the task force worries some Democratic lawmakers, who say they’re concerned that their counterparts in the General Assembly have their mind made up — and students will be the ones to suffer.
Task force chair Sen. Mike Nemes, a Republican from Shepherdsville, told KyCIR the group has no underlying agenda to break up the district.
“At least if they thought it was the agenda, they picked the wrong guy to chair it,” he said.
At the same time, Nemes said that the committee would support that recommendation if advocates showed through data and research that dividing JCPS would be “best for students.”
We want to know what you think: Should JCPS be dismantled and broken up into smaller districts?
Tell us what you think about the district — the good and the bad.
Here’s how
We want to hear from you.
Record a voice note on your phone and email it to news@lpm.org.
Please limit the recording to about one minute.
Tell us your name, your neighborhood and how old you are. Tell us about your relationship with JCPS — are you a graduate, a teacher, a student or parent? (You don’t need to be, but we’d like to know.)
And tell us what you think about the potential to split up JCPS. Do you think it’s a good idea? A bad idea? Most importantly, tell us why.
We will listen to what you say. We might get in contact with you and we might use what you say on the radio, our website or social media.
