Williams goes after Jefferson County School Board and JCTA

Wave-3 TV has the details here.

However, WAVE-3 misses some important material, so, as the late Paul Harvey used to say, here is the rest of the story.

WAVE-3 reports in other articles that the Jefferson County Teachers Association (JCTA) makes some very large campaign contributions to favored school board candidates, sometimes running to enormous amounts over $100,000.

So, William’s comments that the union controls the local board of education have good supporting evidence.

Also, a pending report from the Kentucky Office of Education Accountability (OEA), which was approved by the Kentucky Legislature’s Education Assessment and Accountability Review Subcommittee in December, shows that the JCTA has definitely been involved in activities that were unfavorable to children.

For example, Jefferson County has the only remaining union contract in Kentucky that still allows seniority to trump the superintendent’s and principals’ authority to place teachers where they are most needed.

The OEA also points out that some procedures and provisions in the JCTA contract may run afoul of statute.

One of the most serious charges is that the union negotiated a Memorandum of Agreement with the school district on restaffing in the district’s Persistently Low-Achieving Schools. In consequence, the report shows that a large proportion of the teachers who wound up in those schools were highly inexperienced first-year interns. House Bill 176 was written specifically to prohibit that from happening and it looks like the Memorandum violated that law.

What is even worse, it looks like the school district isn’t even planning to fix the issue of low-experience teachers, either.

So, there is a lot behind Sen. Williams’ comments that WAVE-3 didn’t cover.

Stay tuned, because I think Senator Williams is going to open a lot of eyes on the real situation in Jefferson County schools. It’s about time.