Fox 41: Parents had to sign up in advance to address Jefferson County Board of Education

Rule limited discussion of problems

The Jefferson County Board of Education’s rule is hard to understand.

If you want to speak at many legislative meetings, all you have to do is show up a few minutes early and sign up on the speakers’ list. The same was true under former Kentucky Board of Education chair Joe Brothers’ rules – show up a few minutes before the board meeting started, and you got to speak.

Not so for the Jefferson County Board of Education. Fox news reported that anyone who wanted to speak at last night’s meeting had to sign up in advance – other reports said no later than several hours before the meeting – and those who signed up had to say what they planned to talk about.

This clearly limited parent presentations last night.

Follow-up Fox coverage today says a parent who didn’t sign up was ejected when she tried to address the board.

Twelve parents did get to speak, but Fox provides little coverage of what they said.

So, we still don’t know if the two examples of bad busing experiences discussed in this blog and a comment to the blog were widespread or mostly isolated problems.

If you know of other examples of the Jefferson County busing program going crazy, we want to hear about it. Please leave a comment or call the Bluegrass Institute (270-782-2140) so one of our staff can contact you. We especially want to hear if there are more recent problems from this week.