News from the South - Kentucky News Feed
Relief for missed school days in doubt after picking up surprise addition in KY Senate
Relief for missed school days in doubt after picking up surprise addition in KY Senate
by McKenna Horsley, Kentucky Lantern
March 6, 2025
FRANKFORT — A bill that began as relief for Kentucky schools from weather-related closings was transformed by the Senate Thursday into relief for a controversial virtual school.
After the Senate overhauled House Bill 241, its sponsor, Rep. Timmy Truett, an elementary school principal, said he would recommend that the House now kill it.
The Kentucky Board of Education recently limited enrollment at the Kentucky Virtual School based out of the Cloverport Independent Schools in response to concerns about poor student performance and failure to meet staffing requirements.
The bill that emerged from the Republican-controlled Senate Thursday on a 23-14 vote would block the Department of Education from enforcing the enrollment cap on the privately-operated virtual school which has students statewide.
Some Republicans joined Democrats in voting against the bill.
Supporters of the virtual school attached their provision to a bill described by Senate President Pro Tem David Givens as “vitally important” for school districts affected by recent flooding.
State law requires districts to provide 170 student attendance days. The original bill would allow districts to have five of the required days waived and to lengthen the school day. It also granted them additional days in which students could be taught at home via virtual learning. Some schools in Eastern Kentucky have yet to reopen following floods in mid-February.
In a Thursday morning committee meeting, language from Senate Bill 268 was added to the House bill. Truett, R-McKee, told senators it was the first time he had seen the new version of his legislation.
“This bill started off as a really good bill for all the districts in the state of Kentucky, especially the districts in Eastern Kentucky where I live,” Truett said. “But you can take a good bill and make it bad. And I’m afraid that with the amendment that may be on this bill that I would have to encourage my colleagues to be against this bill.”
The move could mean the bill doesn’t pass at all this session, Truett warned.
Concerns about the Kentucky Virtual School have been reported by the Louisville Courier Journal and Lexington Herald-Leader, which highlighted numerous accusations and lawsuits raised against Stride, a for-profit company that has a contract to run the virtual academy. While it serves students across the state through online instruction, the academy is attached to Cloverport Independent Schools in Breckinridge County.
According to the media reports, the school has rapidly increased its enrollment over the past two years but state education officials say it has failed to meet staff and testing requirements. The Kentucky Board of Education recently took action to limit enrollment through a new statewide policy.
Senators debated not only the contents of the bill, but the legislative process behind it, for more than an hour Thursday afternoon. Democrats futilely attempted to argue the bill was out of order under Senate rules because it had emerged from the committee just hours earlier with significant changes.
Democratic Caucus Chair Sen. Reggie Thomas, of Lexington, cited the newspapers’ reports on the floor and emphasized the legislation is a “matter of public interest.”
“The public, I feel, does have a right to know about what we’re about to do,” Thomas said.
Sen. Aaron Reed, R-Shelbyville, who was the original sponsor of the bill revoking the enrollment cap on the virtual school, cited “emotional testimony” from parents of students enrolled at the academy. “What I heard from parents made one thing very clear — this decision (to cap enrollment) was made without fully considering the impact on students and families who had built their education around this model. “To me, that’s not right.”
Truett heard some of the Senate debate, watching from the side of the chamber. While he was present, Sen. Lindsey Tichenor, R-Smithfield, said that she wasn’t happy with Truett’s original bill, but was supportive of Reed’s bill, and added that her family used Stride’s curriculum for homeschooling in the past.
“I’m going to encourage the House sponsor to support this bill, because House Bill 241 didn’t change the way that I want to see it change,” she said before voting in favor of the bill. Tichenor had filed four floor amendments to the original version of the bill.
Truett quickly left after the vote.
Givens said he was a supporter of the new language and also supports the original provisions for making up school days missed because of weather. “This door provides relief for those districts,” he said. “This is vitally important that we do this.”
The House must concur with the Senate’s version of HB 241. It’s not the first time in recent sessions a bill has been drastically changed in one chamber. Last year, the House overhauled Senate Bill 6, which became a bill to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education. The measure died at the end of the session because the Senate and House couldn’t agree.
The Cloverport district’s superintendent, Keith Haynes, said in an email to the Kentucky Lantern that while he couldn’t speak to the merits of the legislative process, he was supportive of the contents of SB 268 “as it affords us the opportunity to continue operating and improving the Kentucky Virtual Academy, which has provided so many students and families with the kind of school environment that best suits them.”
“Our experience with Stride has been great,” Haynes added. “They have been highly professional and laser focused on ensuring that KYVA is the kind of school that all involved can be proud of.”
Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com.
The post Relief for missed school days in doubt after picking up surprise addition in KY Senate appeared first on kentuckylantern.com
News from the South - Kentucky News Feed
WKU baseball holds youth camp at Nick Denes Field
SUMMARY: During summer break at WKU, the baseball camp energized Nick Denes Field with boys aged 6-12 learning hitting, throwing, fielding, and sliding. Hilltopper pitcher Gavin Perry actively coached, challenging campers with batting practice while keeping the atmosphere fun. Perry joked about losing count of home runs given up, highlighting the camp’s competitive yet enjoyable spirit. WKU director of operations Derek Francis emphasized the importance of remembering baseball as a fun game, noting how the kids’ enthusiasm and positive attitudes remind coaches of the joy in sports often overlooked in higher levels.
The post WKU baseball holds youth camp at Nick Denes Field appeared first on www.wnky.com
News from the South - Kentucky News Feed
Franklin man charged after marijuana operation found in home
SUMMARY: A Franklin, Kentucky man, Terry Moss, 60, was arrested following an investigation by the South Central Kentucky Drug Task Force on July 10. Authorities discovered an indoor marijuana cultivation operation at his residence on South Main Street. Moss faces multiple charges, including marijuana cultivation (five plants or more) with firearm enhancement, marijuana trafficking with firearm enhancement, drug paraphernalia possession, and first-degree possession of controlled substances including hydrocodone. The search uncovered several marijuana plants, processed marijuana, two firearms, drug paraphernalia, prescription pills, and U.S. currency. Charges will be presented to a grand jury. Multiple local law enforcement agencies assisted in the operation.
The post Franklin man charged after marijuana operation found in home appeared first on www.wnky.com
News from the South - Kentucky News Feed
100 years after John Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution, education is again on trial
by Berry Craig, Kentucky Lantern
July 10, 2025
Today I’m remembering what Lela Scopes told me about her famous brother for my Paducah Sun story going on 46 years ago.
She said before John Thomas Scopes left to teach science and coach football at Rhea County High School in Dayton, Tenn., in 1924, he explained, “I’m going there because it’s a small town with a small school where I won’t get in any deep water.”
The skinny, bespectacled, freckle-faced 24-year-old from Paducah ended up the defendant in one of history’s most sensationalized courtroom battles.
A century ago this month, Scopes was convicted of violating the Butler Act, a Volunteer State law that forbade the teaching of evolution in public schools. His punishment was a $100 fine.
But the “Monkey Trial” grabbed newspaper headlines worldwide. Dozens of reporters converged on Dayton. So did tent revivalists and swarms of hucksters hawking popcorn and pink lemonade and hustling Bibles and souvenirs, including stuffed monkeys.
“The State of Tennessee v John Thomas Scopes” was also the first trial broadcast live on radio.
I interviewed Lela Scopes in August 1979, when I was a Sun feature writer. She also said John had worried about what their mother might think of the trial: “He was afraid it would get in the Louisville paper, Mother would read about it and think he was a hothead.”
Anyway, as Mark Twain said, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” and now is one of those rhyming times.
“Public education is once again under siege from a sustained effort by Christian Nationalists to blur the line between church and state,” warns A.J. Schumann, a youth organizing fellow with Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
Like today, the 1920s were times of “rapid social, economic and cultural change,” said David Krueger, professor emeritus of history at West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah.
Scopes admitted he covered evolution when he substitute taught for the absent biology teacher. (In their zeal to ban evolution, Tennessee lawmakers failed to remove the state-approved biology textbook, which included evolution.)
Scopes believed in evolution and agreed to stand trial on principle.
The trial, which began on July 10, 1925, and concluded on July 21, was essentially a clash of competing values: urban science and modernism versus rural, old-time Protestant fundamentalist Christianity.
“The cause defended at Dayton is a continuing one that has existed throughout man’s brief history and will continue as long as man is here,” Scopes wrote in “Center of the Storm,” his 1967 memoir. “It is the cause of freedom, for which man must do what he can.”
The attorneys embodied the collision of values. Tennessee summoned William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska as special prosecutor. A fundamentalist champion, he had been a Democratic congressman, secretary of state and three-time Democratic presidential candidate.
The American Civil Liberties Union hired Clarence Darrow to lead Scopes’ defense team. Darrow was widely considered the country’s top defense lawyer. He was from Chicago, believed in evolution and was an agnostic.
Bryan and Darrow dueled like gladiators in the sweltering midsummer East Tennessee heat. The courtroom became so hot that the trial was moved outdoors to the tree-shaded courthouse lawn where the crowd of spectators grew even larger.
Bryan got a conviction as expected. But progressives, including liberal Christians, believed science and reason had vanquished “EVIL-lution” in the court of public opinion. They pointed to July 20 when Darrow called Bryan to the stand as a Bible expert.
“There was no pity for the helplessness of the believer come so suddenly and so unexpectedly upon a moment when he could not reconcile statements of the Bible with generally accepted facts,” The New York Times reported. “There was no pity for his admissions of ignorance of things boys and girls learn in high school, his floundering confessions that he knew practically nothing of geology, biology, philology, little of comparative religion, and little even of ancient history.”
… separation of church and state is not something we can take for granted. It is a principle that must be actively defended, especially in moments of cultural anxiety and political division, when calls to return to some mythic past grow loudest.”
– A.J. Schumann, Americans United for Separation of Church and State
In “Only Yesterday,” his 1931 chronicle of the 1920s, Frederick Lewis Allen wrote: “Theoretically, Fundamentalism had won, for the law stood. Yet really Fundamentalism had lost. Legislators might go on passing anti-evolution laws, and in the hinterlands the pious might still keep their religion locked in a science-proof compartment of their minds; but civilized opinion everywhere had regarded the Dayton trial with amazement and amusement, and the slow drift away from Fundamentalist certainty continued.”
Allen and the progressives of his day missed the mark. Donald Trump and his Republican Party owe a big part of their electoral success to white Christian evangelicals of the “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” persuasion.
Schumann warned that “today’s Christian Nationalist rhetoric echoes the anti-modernist anxieties of the 1920s — fear that secularism is destroying ‘traditional values’ and that public institutions should reflect a ‘Christian America.’”
He wrote that the First Amendment safeguards all Americans “from having any single belief system imposed on them by the state,” a fact that seems to be lost on much of the GOP these days.
Schumann concluded that the Scopes “trial reminds us that the separation of church and state is not something we can take for granted. It is a principle that must be actively defended, especially in moments of cultural anxiety and political division, when calls to return to some mythic past grow loudest.”
Scopes died in 1970 at age 70. He is buried in the family plot in Paducah’s Oak Grove Cemetery next to his wife, Mildred, and close to Lela, who died in 1989 at 92. “A Man of Courage” is his epitaph. A state historical marker at the cemetery’s main entrance tells about him.
Scopes said not a word during the trial. He got his chance at the end.
After the jury delivered the expected guilty verdict and the judge fined Scopes $100, one of his lawyers pointed out that the defendant had been denied the right to speak before sentencing.
“Your Honor, I feel that I have been convicted of violating an unjust statute,” Scopes said. “I will continue in the future, as I have in the past, to oppose this law in any way I can. Any other action would be in violation of my ideals of academic freedom, that is to teach the truth as guaranteed in our Constitution, of personal and religious freedom. I think the fine is unjust.”
After Scopes finished, the judge repeated the fine. The verdict was later overturned on a technicality, Schumann wrote, but the Butler Act wasn’t repealed until 1967.
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Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com.
The post 100 years after John Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution, education is again on trial appeared first on kentuckylantern.com
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Center-Left
The content presents a viewpoint that emphasizes the importance of separating church and state and supports scientific education, framing the Scopes Trial as a historic battle between modernism and religious fundamentalism. It highlights concerns about contemporary Christian Nationalist influence on public education, particularly critiquing elements within the GOP, which indicates a critical stance toward conservative religious politics. However, it maintains a respectful historical recount and balanced tone by providing factual background and quoting multiple perspectives, reflecting a generally moderate but slightly progressive viewpoint favoring secularism and academic freedom.
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