The Next Louisville: Public Education

The Louisville Tea Party has developed new education initiatives the group plans to support through fund raising.

There are four initiatives on the Louisville Tea Party’s website. They include supporting school choice and charter schools.  The party says students should not spend more than 30 minutes on a bus unless parents sign a waiver allowing them to spend extra time being transported.

Marcus McCormick sacrificed his own education for his brothers, sometimes stealing food from grocery stores to feed his hungry family. But after he dropped out of school and left home his brothers stopped going to school.

This is the second in a series of stories WFPL is airing over the next month profiling former public school students that left school before graduating. The series sheds light on the personal narratives behind statistics and data media often report. 

Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday is taking steps to ensure Jefferson County’s lowest achieving schools—called priority schools—have the strategies in place to improve.

Holliday met with Superintendent Donna Hargens Tuesday and discussed numerous expectations and recommendations for JCPS to consider.

A Louisville student has organized a conference this weekend to discuss the School to Prison Pipeline, a concept that says many public school policies are resulting in a disproportionate number of minority and low-income students entering the justice system.

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony for the first time last year bringing national attention into the chambers of the federal government.

Education and community leaders say the public school system needs local solutions to improve student achievement—but those solutions may vary depending on who you ask.

A crowd packed into St. Stephen Family Life Center Thursday to listen to Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday, Jefferson County Public Schools superintendent Donna Hargens and other guest speakers who shared their thoughts on the challenges facing the district’s lowest performing students.

Jefferson County Public Schools' 2012 graduation rates have improved slightly over last year.

Officials are celebrating some key indicators: The most recent 2011-2012 data says 69.4 percent of JCPS students graduated last year. Data for the 2010-2011 school year shows the rate was 67.8--a decrease from the previous year.

In the 2011-2012 school year, the state's graduation rates was 77.8 percent.  The 2010-2011 year it was 78.8, which was an improvement over the previous year.

Pierre Travis, 23, has lived in Louisville's West End his whole life.

Like other youth we interviewed for our series featuring students who at some point dropped out of the public school system, Travis attended several Jefferson County public schools. 

Travis says after being suspended sophomore year he was sent to Buechel Metropolitan High School, one of the district's several alternative schools. Here, he cycled in and out of the system over the next three years and ultimately left Buechel after being arrested for threatening a teacher, he says.

Kentucky follows the national trend of allocating less funding for higher education since the recession, according to the latest education report from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

The report released Tuesday says Kentucky has cut higher education since 2008 by 26 percent—or $2,663 per student—when adjusted for inflation. That’s only slightly better than the national average of 28 percent, the report says.

Twenty-three-year-old Steven Gholston was born in Louisville’s South End but moved all over Jefferson County, even spending time in Cincinnati and Georgia. He says constantly being on the move was difficult.

Gholston says he attended over half a dozen Jefferson County Public Schools before dropping out.