Two education bills from Scott County Republican Sen. Matt Nunn passed out of a Senate committee Thursday. One aims to address student violence against Kentucky teachers, while the other creates an optional cash-out sick leave policy for school districts.
Neither received opposition in the Senate Education Committee and are now headed to the Senate floor for a vote.
Nunn’s Senate Bill 101 would require school boards to expel students between sixth- and twelfth-grades for at least 12 months if they intentionally physically harm a school employee on campus or during a school function.
The legislation was discussed during a Juvenile Justice Oversight Council meeting earlier this month as well.
Nunn told the Senate Education Committee that he removed a section from the bill that would have allowed prosecuting as adults students who are 14-18 and charged with assaulting a school employee.
The bill would also require school employees to report any incidents by students of intentional assault or intentional attempted assault of any school employee. Failure to do so on the first offense would be a Class B misdemeanor and a Class A misdemeanor on the second and future offenses.
Nunn said he began thinking about a solution to violence towards teachers after hearing fears from an educator friend. He recalled asking her why she felt afraid to work in a school.
“I said, ‘Well, why would you feel that way?’ She said, ‘Matt, there are boys in my class that are your size. They have no respect for authority and no fear of consequences.’ And that stuck with me,” he said.
Nunn said that statistics from the Kentucky Education Association show that there have been 25,000 reports of assault against teachers in Kentucky since 2021. He also believes the issue is underreported.
Nunn read aloud a letter from a former teacher in his Senate district recounting alerting school administrators to escalating tensions between a student and others in their class. Ultimately, the letter said, the teacher stood between a student, referred to as Student A, and another student to break up a fight.
“I could not physically restrain either of them. All I could do was what I’d been doing. I put my body between them, and took the brunt of it all,” the letter said.
Nunn said that he believes such situations are not only unfair to teachers, who want to have a safe career, but also unfair to other students in the classroom.
“We talk about how students might be impacted by this bill, by the consequences of this bill. But let’s talk about the other students in the building,” Nunn said. “It’s not fair to them to be faced with this threat. It’s not fair to them to potentially lose a good teacher that leaves a profession because of this threat.”
Sen. Danny Carroll, R-Paducah, raised concerns about how expelled students are supervised during their year outside of school.
“I can tell you from experience, these kids are out walking the streets and there’s not supervision, any type of formal oversight,” said Carroll, a former police officer. “They’re getting in trouble again.”
Carroll also had concerns about the misdemeanor charges for failing to report. He later voted in favor of the bill.
“I’m wondering if it would not be better to leave it up to school district policy … on setting penalties for not reporting things,” he said. “I’m troubled a little bit with the possibility of someone being charged with a misdemeanor simply for not reporting something, and especially if they were only the victim.”
Minority Caucus Chair Reggie Thomas, D-Lexington, said that while he would also vote in favor of the bill, he encouraged his fellow lawmakers to recognize that by expelling a student during their formative years for a year, “we’ve lost that student” and encouraged them to think about what to do after that.
“It is foolish to think that that student is going to come back after a year and be a model student. That’s just not going to happen,” Thomas said.
Sen. Gex Williams, R-Verona, said while casting his vote for the bill that lawmakers on the committee didn’t see this issue when they were in school “because you didn’t have a compulsory attendance law throughout the state.”
In 2013, the Kentucky General Assembly raised the compulsory attendance age, or the age when a student could drop out of school, from 16 to 18, amending a 1934 law.
“And how we handled those students? A lot of them went to work full-time. Now that we have a compulsory attendance law, they cannot work full time, and that is a problem,” Williams said. “Yes, we would like them to stay in school, we would like them to be educated, but compelling education on many of these children is not working and it’s created a dangerous situation for both teachers and parents in the school.”
Cash-out sick leave policies
Also approved by the committee, Senate Bill 124, would allow school districts to adopt an optional policy to pay teachers annually for unused sick leave above 15 days. They would receive 30% of their daily wage for each sick day not used. Nunn was joined by Scott County Schools Superintendent Billy Parker for presentation of the bill. Parker said he had wanted to introduce the policy locally this year, but ran into issues with offering the policy to certified workers, which includes teachers.
“This is an optional measure that provides something for all sides, really. Necessity is the mother of invention, and this idea was born out of the potential solution to help address the sub shortage that exists across the state,” Parker said. “But instead of looking for more subs, this is trying to find a way that focuses on limiting the need for subs by incentivizing sick days.
A 2023 report from the Office of Education Accountability (OEA) said that 65% of superintendents at the time reported hiring substitutes was a “crisis area.”
Nunn said SB 124 also has a provision he was encouraged to add by Lebanon Republican Sen. Jimmy Higdon that would permit teachers to use sick leave for religious holidays not on the school calendar.
An actuarial analysis from the Kentucky Public Pensions Authority said that about 47,000 employees and retirees could be affected by the change, but there is no estimated change in benefit payments “as the bill states that compensation paid for unused sick leave prior to retirement is explicitly excluded from creditable compensation.”