It’s the perfect storm. Regardless who wins this year’s presidential election, certain holdout blue school districts in red states are poised to have Project 2025 rammed down our throats as soon as the election is over. Louisville, Kentucky is one of them.
Let’s recap.
It’s been a project in the making since at least 2013, when superintendent Donna Hargens showed her hand in trying to turn Shawnee High School into a charter school.
Governor Matt Bevin declared “We’re gonna bring Charters to Kentucky and we’re going to start in West Louisville.” We protested and were locked out of a public event.
We had a bigoted encounter with one of the Black pastors who isn’t even from Kentucky.
Hal Heiner was caught meeting with David Jones Jr’s hand-picked strategist, Jonathan Lowe at Shawnee. He also paid a similar visit to Maupin Elementary. Both schools were embroiled in fraudulent activities committed by district leadership, which whistleblowers exposed.
There have been threats of state takeovers. There have been bills to force kids to attend school in their own neighborhoods. There have been audit after audit after audit. There’s been the attacks on teachers and the feigned surprise of teacher shortages. There’s been lack of supports for kids in trauma, with disabilities, from poor, minority, low educational attainment households resulting in unaddressed behavior and too much emphasis on the wrong things and not enough emphasis on the right things, resulting in higher costs, fewer resources and personnel to go around, and a shift to a more punitive, less educational education system.
There have also been injustices to teachers. From breaking the pension promise, to denying them raises when the rest of the state saw theirs, to stealing elections from their own members. For example, there was a botched BSK election. A stolen executive election. ANOTHER stolen executive election. Not to mention the recruiting and grooming of a haram of loyalists to protect a sordid and clandestine lifestyle of a privileged few, at the expense of children, taxpayers and a naive, trusting host. Over the period between now and the election, we will continue to demonstrate the people, places and things that are involved in possibly protecting predators and conspiring to conduct elaborate schemes to defraud the public. You be the judge.
They are running out of time so they are ramping up their game!
In just this past year alone, there’s been a twice changed bell schedule, an audit, a task force that seeks to divide us and the historically significant slap in the face, which is the cancelation of transportation for students from socio-economically challenged backgrounds who finally made it to their school of choice — the VERY DEMOGRAPHIC we should be making sure gets a ride to their hard-earned educational opportunity, but instead, it’s been granted to those who already face the least challenges, by definition. With so much emphasis on “choice” as the reason to support charter schools and vouchers, isn’t it odd how desperate lawmakers who hail from mostly white districts are to end it for black, brown and poor students from Louisville’s West and South ends? This November there is also the constitutional amendment on the ballot that will permanently and irrevocably allow predators to turn on the funding mechanism for charter schools and vouchers at the expense of public schools, something GOP-dominant lawmakers have been unable to accomplish BECAUSE stakeholders have already WON this battle on every front. The same group that successfully won the case that led to KERA in the 1980s also won in the Kentucky Supreme Court who declared charter schools were a violation of the Kentucky Constitution. Instead of these political manipulators accepting “no” for an answer, they forced the issue to this November’s ballot. If the 2nd Constitutional Amendment passes, Kentucky will go from being the largest holdout state that has managed to keep charter schools and vouchers from taking hold, to open season on the state’s largest public school district. It won’t matter who wins the presidency. There will be nothing stopping the GOP from implementing Project 2025 here if that happens.
Check out our website dedicated to the issue of helping Kentuckians #StopProject2025inKY, much along the same ways we managed to so far #StopChartersInKY. Please consider making a donation to one of the non-profits who have been leading this charge since we realized who and what were behind these efforts: Dear JCPS and Save Our Schools Kentucky, starting in 2015. We weren’t the only ones, but we have been first, loudest and most consistent. And the most marginalized schools and students in JCPS are the ones most impacted and that is who we set out to represent from day one.