More public school failure in Kentucky

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Linda Blackford is a long-time columnist for the Lexington Herald-Leader, and, despite being a long-time Kentuckian, she’s liberal to her core. We have previously noted the newspaper’s endorsements, and they are all to the left:

The voters of the Sixth District, and of Kentucky as a whole, rejected every one of the newspaper’s endorsements.

Come 2023, they’ll endorse Governor Andy Beshear, he who unconstitutionally suspended the free exercise of religion and freedom of peaceable assembly in 2020, for re-election, and in 2024, whichever Democrat runs for the Sixth District seat, assuming he’s not a kook like this year.

So I’ll admit it: even though I am subscribing to what my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal, I don’t usually pay much attention to Mrs Blackford’s columns. I did, however read this one, in which she pushed for the Fayette County School Board to select “a person of color who understands what many of our students face in school”, as the replacement for Christy Morris, who resigned her position. The usual race-based drivel followed, and was mostly unremarkable and unimportant. There was, however, one very important statistic given:

Students of color make up about 53 percent of students, while about 48.5 percent of all students are considered low income.

Really? The Fayette County Public Schools are 53% “students of color”? According to the Census Bureau, a full 70.0% of Fayette County’s population are non-Hispanic white, with another 2.8% being white, but Hispanic as well. Perhaps they are being counted as “students of color”, “brown” perhaps, the way the left do these days. But it has to be asked: if Fayette County’s population are 70% non-Hispanic white, why are the public schools majority “students of color”?

Let’s face it: private schools are expensive! I know, as we put our girls in parochial schools for part of the time. Sayre School is the hoitiest and toitiest of the private schools in Lexington, with the high school tuition being $26,625 per year. That’s more than tuition at the University of Kentucky’s College of Law!

Lexington Catholic High School’s tuition is significantly lower, at $11,170 for one student, if the family are Catholic parishioners, and $13,690 for non-Catholics. That’s a significant chunk of change that people have been willing to pay rather than send their kids to the Fayette County public schools. In very liberal Lexington — Fayette Countians gave 59.25% of their votes to Joe Biden in 2020, in a year when Kentuckians as a whole voted to re-elect President Trump, 62.09% to 36.15% — much of the white population have rejected the public schools.

And today, the state Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional a Republican plan to assist poorer families to afford private schools.

Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto of the bill was overridden with a slim 51-member majority in the House.

In his veto message, Beshear said the bill would “harm public education in Kentucky by taking money away from public schools.” In a post to Twitter on Thursday, the governor took his message a step further. He compared the EOA law to the newly passed law funding charter schools in Kentucky.

“Today’s ruling by the Kentucky Supreme Court couldn’t be more clear: state funding for private or charter schools is unconstitutional – period. It’s time for the General Assembly to invest in our public schools, our teachers and our children,” Beshear wrote.

Fayette County Public Schools argued against the law, saying that it stripped resources away from its schools and students.

The Kentucky Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, celebrated the ruling.

“This decision protects the power of the people to decide important questions of public education policy and holds the legislature to account to uphold their oath to support and defend the Kentucky Constitution… We simply can’t afford to support two different education systems — one private and one public — on the taxpayers’ dime, and this ruling supports that concern. This decision is proof that the courts continue to serve as an important check against legislative overreach,” KEA President Eddie Campbell wrote.

So, what do we have? The state Supreme Court’s ruling that the law was unconstitutional may well be fundamentally correct based on the state constitution, but the fact remains that, in the Commonwealth’s wealthiest county, about as many families who can afford to send their children someplace other than the Fayette County public schools are choosing to do so. Even before the law was passed — it never took effect because Franklin County Judge Phil Shepherd, a Democrat and stooge of Governor Beshear, issued an injunction against it — parents in Lexington who could afford it were voting against the public schools with their private school choices. They were still being taxed to support the public schools, but sure didn’t want to send their own kids there.

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