What Covington’s ‘school of innovation’ denial says about education in KY

Accusations of hasty decision making, political interloping and clandestine payouts for teachers have shaken Covington Independent Public Schools and its attempt to establish what has been dubbed a school of innovation at Holmes Middle School.

The proposed initiative, if ever implemented, would revamp the organizational and curricular structure of the middle school. It was first discussed late last year to much fanfare from some of the district’s Board members, but the Kentucky Board of Education issued a denial in early February of the district’s ask for legal exemptions that would enable the changes.

The Covington Board has since voted to begin the process of crafting a new application, but Superintendent Alvin Garrison and other district leaders aren’t happy, characterizing the proposal as rushed and short-sighted. Garrison has even alleged that teachers involved in the proposal “were compensated $10,000 by a local nonprofit, EducateNKY.”

In short, there’s much more going on here than teaching methods and curriculum structures. In the shadow of 2024’s defeat of Amendment 2, which would have allowed public money to fund private schools, the issues of school funding, school structures, teaching methods and the roles of schools in the community have returned to the fore in Covington. And how the situation plays out may presage future conflicts about education in the commonwealth.

Schools of innovation & SB 207

Covington Independent tends to hemorrhage students between fifth and sixth grade, when they transition from the district’s elementary schools to Holmes Middle. This has been observed both in state data and by independent consultants: Architectural firm SHP, with whom the district contracted last year to help craft its new master facilities plan, predicted the district would likely continue to see continued declining enrollment in the coming years, which will inevitably affect the school’s funding structure and role in the community.

Sources who spoke with LINK nky affirmed this. In the transition from the elementary schools to the middle school, Covington families will sometimes elect to move their kids into either the county district or into one of the region’s many parochial schools. The school of innovation initiative has been pitched as a way of both helping students better prepare for future workforce demands and incentivizing local families to stay with the district long term.

It’s seemingly the brainchild of Holmes Middle School Principal Lee Turner, who began developing the proposal in the latter quarter of 2025 and first presented it to the Covington Board late last year.

“I was an elementary principal at Latonia Elementary,” Turner told LINK nky, “and that was one of the schools where some of the kids go to take alternatives to different schools, besides coming to Holmes. So, I’ve known about that being an issue because I was trying to push the kids to go to Holmes Middle School.”

Turner said inspiration came first following the introduction of Paxton/Patterson Labs at the Holmes campus. The labs are small, hands-on modules that introduce students to basic tools and concepts for different careers. The labs, as well as other partnerships the school had with businesses and organizations, prompted Turner to think of ways to make the middle school “a place where inquiry and inter-disciplinary learning and authentic problem solving were a norm in our school.”

Turner and Holmes Middle School Science Teacher Rachel Blackwood gave a brief overview of the potential revamp on Dec. 4. LINK nky made a records request for a more complete proposal, which yielded about 55 pages laying out a broad-strokes vision for the middle school.

The “school of innovation” moniker is not Turner’s. Instead, it comes from Kentucky Senate Bill 207, which became law last year. It granted districts the ability to ask for waivers to typical administrative requirements in order to experiment with novel school structures.

Districts don’t have free rein to request waivers for everything. Federal requirements, civil rights requirements, criminal background checks for teachers, financial reporting, state assessment requirements and several other regulations can’t be touched, but others pertaining to how school days and instruction are structured are fair game.

In order to get a waiver, a district must submit a written narrative identifying the laws it wants exemptions from and offer arguments as to how the waivers could improve student performance. The Kentucky Board of Education then considers the merits of the waiver request and issues a decision.

The main sponsor of the bill was Kentucky Sen. Stephen West, a Republican from Paris, who told the General Assembly’s Budget Subcommittee on Education in September that he proposed the law after last year’s defeat of Amendment 2 at the ballot box, according to reporting from the Kentucky Lantern. Northern Kentucky Republican Senators Shelley Funke Frommeyer, Steve Rawlings and Gex Williams also sponsored the bill.

West, who is also the chairman of the Senate Education Committee, told lawmakers that the law allows “outside private investment” into the public education system.

“Everywhere you look in your life, choice is almost always better,” West said in September. “And so whether it’s the car you drive or the movie you go to or whatever, we demand choices. But for some reason in K-12, it’s been pretty stagnant, and there’s a lack of choice.” 

Critics of the bill feared this was a way of circumventing Amendment 2’s defeat. Kentucky Rep. Tina Bojanowski, a Democrat and public school teacher from Louisville, asked that with the legislation allowing Kentucky to “subcontract the management of a specific school to an outside entity” if that is “exactly what a charter school is.” 

West answered yes, but a main difference would be “the initiation of the request by the local district,” giving the public school district “more control” than under previously passed charter school legislation. West said such schools could also pay teachers more as an incentive outside of the school district pay scale. 

The text of the bill corroborates the bit about outside management, stating “in addition to any other waivers granted for the school or program, a school of innovation shall be granted a waiver from all statutes and administrative regulations that would prevent the district from entering into an agreement with an education service provider to assist in the management and operation of the school or program.”

This is a key difference between a conventional public school, which is governed by an elected Board of Education and a state-funded in-house administration, and a charter school, which is governed by a independent managing board or organization (although charter schools in Kentucky are legally considered public schools).

Outsourced management does not appear in the Holmes Middle School proposal, however, and Turner emphasized that the proposal was, at this point, simply an “idea,” rather than a fully-fledged plan.

Several sources who spoke with LINK nky stated that Covington was the first school to employ the mechanisms of SB 207. LINK nky could not corroborate if the district was, in fact, the very first district in Kentucky to do so, but given the bill passed just last year, it’s certainly among the first.

The proposal

Revamping the middle school would entail several key changes. Firstly, it would see the implementation of an interdisciplinary teaching structure, where teachers from different subject specialties would co-mingle instruction, rather than having everything siloed off.

Subjects would be organized into four pathways: humanities, STEM, applied and trades. Humanities would focus on communication, civic education and awareness of global events. STEM would focus on data literacy, technology skills and forms of scientific inquiry. The applied pathway would focus mostly on real-world skills like entrepreneurship and design. Trades would focus on, well, trades education, which has gained traction among school districts in NKY.

Holmes Middle School houses grades six through eight. Under the new structure, sixth graders would be able to explore all four pathways at their leisure to see what interests them. When they move to seventh grade, they will have to pick two tracks to focus on. In eighth grade, they would spend their time completing a capstone project in one of the specialty areas. Eighth graders could also pursue internships.

Turner and Blackwood said that this redesign is based on both community feedback and a desire to help students prepare for the modern world.

The proposal calls for gradual implementation of the program from 2026 to 2029 with calls for greater implementation at other schools throughout the region in the future.

The district submitted its application packet to the Kentucky Board of Education and the Kentucky Department of Education at the end of last year. The Department sent a letter to the district on Dec. 23 warning that it had failed to properly fill out the cover sheet of its application (this is corroborated in LINK’s records request) and would likely be denied, as a result.

More notably, however, the application paperwork, also provided in LINK’s records request, is rife with legal inaccuracies and misapprehensions: The Department warned the district that the Kentucky Board of Education did not have the authority, in spite of SB 207’s passage, to waive some of the statutory requirements the district asked about. Other statutory provisions in the application either did not exist at all, make inaccurate textual references or cite administrative regulations that did not fall under the purview of the Board of Education.

For instance, at one point in the application, the writer states that “KRS 161.100(1) states: ‘A teacher shall be assigned only to a position for which the teacher holds the proper certification.'”

That law, which you can read here, lacks a subsection (1) as indicated in the application, and the quoted text appears nowhere in the statute. Similar errors appear elsewhere in the application.

The Kentucky Department of Education’s letter concludes by stating the district could postpone its application if it submitted a written request. It apparently did not, so the Kentucky Board of Education denied the district’s request at its meeting on Feb. 4.

Allegations

Covington Superintendent Garrison made his concerns about the application known at the Covington Board meeting on Feb. 26 after the state had already issued its denial. This was not the first time the issue had been discussed in the open, but it was the first time the superintendent expressed his concerns publicly.

The relationship between the members of the Covington Board of Education and district administrators has been acrimonious in the past, and tensions flared at the Feb. 26 meeting. Garrison read aloud from a letter he’d submitted to the Kentucky Board with the district’s application in December.

“The district office had no input in this proposal’s drafting, and I believe it was rushed,” Garrison said. “There are many unresolved questions regarding curriculum – which curriculum does belong to the superintendent; that belongs to the superintendent – scheduling, budgeting, funding, transportation, staffing, differentiated pay and community impact. The proposal’s authors have not adequately considered its effects on the rest of the district.”

Garrison, who is retiring at the end of the school year, worried that a project of such a scale ought to loop in the new superintendent. Additionally, he said the complete proposal for the program had not been publicly facing. He said the proposal showed a “lack of systems thinking.”

Perhaps most notably, however, was his assertion that Turner and the teachers who developed the proposal had either been paid or had been offered payment by EducateNKY to develop the proposal.

EducateNKY is an educational nonprofit that analyzes data and information about education in Northern Kentucky and advocates for educational changes and reforms. It was first formed in 2023 and was incubated at the OneNKY Alliance, which is itself tied up with powerful regional initiatives like BE NKY and the NKY Port Authority. Its mission is arguably reflective of the Alliance’s entrepreneurial, business-minded outlook.

EducateNKY’s website describes itself as trying to “build collaboration that will lead to robust public/private partnerships. These partnerships will lead to more innovation, expanded grant opportunities, expanded business engagement and more meaningful collaborations with public schools, private schools and community agencies to expand educational opportunities and services to students and their families.”

EducateNKY works with many of the independent districts in the river cities and issues grants to kick-start programs and provide resources. It actually made a large donation to Covington Independent in September to fund programming and has also donated to the district to help in a search for a new superintendent.

It has also come out in favor of using SB 207 as a way of experimenting with different kinds of educational initiatives. Covington School Board President Tom Haggard is a VP at EducateNKY, a point that Garrison brought up in his letter.

Educate NKY denies any payouts occurred, at least in the strictest sense.

“To be clear: EducateNKY did not provide any compensation to school employees in connection with this application,” said EducateNKY CEO Cheye Calvo in a written statement. “Any suggestion otherwise is false. We commend the Covington Board of Education for advancing innovation on behalf of students and stand ready to continue supporting meaningful, educator-led reform at Holmes Middle School and across Northern Kentucky.”

A check, which LINK nky has obtained a copy of, was written in the amount of $10,000 from EducateNKY in late November, shortly after Turner first delivered the proposal to the superintendent, but it was not written to Turner directly. It’s written to Holmes Middle School. The district didn’t cash it; it was returned to EducateNKY voided.

Turner declined to comment on the check but said that Garrison’s “allegations aren’t true.”

Calvo said that Turner had approached EducateNKY seeking a way to get a stipend for staff who had developed the proposal, much in the same way a district might apply for a grant to fund work during an after-school program or similar initiative, the labor for which isn’t usually covered in the typical teacher’s salary.

A memo he shared with LINK, dated Feb. 17, states, “on October 29, Principal Turner contacted me to let me know that he had briefed Superintendent Garrison on the proposal and received his approval to move forward with developing an SB 207 application. At that time, Principal Turner asked whether EducateNKY would consider supporting staff time for application development. We agreed to provide a $10,000 grant to the school intended for staff stipends related to drafting the proposal.

“However, Principal Turner was unable to secure central office approval to process staff stipends through district procedures.”

The memo sheds light on other event leading up to the application, namely a symposium on Sept. 25 hosted by Horizon Community Funds, which included a panel moderated by Calvo featuring Sen. West, Covington Board of Education Member Hannah Edelen and Newport Board of Education Chair Ramona Malone.

“In advance of the symposium, I [Calvo] met with Ms. Edelen to discuss SB 207 and the broader concept of school innovation,” the memo reads. “The goal of the panel was straightforward: to elevate awareness of the newly enacted Schools of Innovation statute and to highlight the role elected school board members could play in advancing bold, student-centered redesign efforts within their districts. In addition to Ms. Edelen, two other Covington Board members attended: Tom Haggard and Kareen [sic] Simpson.”

A different memo by Garrison, which appears in LINK’s records request, offers more insight into the timeline of the process and suggests that Garrison had privately expressed his opposition to the proposal. Scott Alter, the assistant superintendent, had also expressed opposition to the proposal, according to the memo. Simpson had informed Calvo as early as August that the district would no longer be working with EdcuateNKY.

According to Garrison’s memo, on Oct. 29 after a luncheon event, “Principal Turner explains to me that he plans to draft a school of innovation proposal during his free time. He says he was approached by about this by Cheye Calvo and [EducateNKY Governing Board Member] Tim Hanner. He also states that he and his 3 or 4 teachers will receive $10,000 for this work. I cautioned him about drafting the proposal.”

The Board voted to instruct the district to begin preparing a new waiver request on Feb. 26. Board Member Michelle Williams was the only board member to vote against it. Edelen initially voted yes but then revised her vote to an abstention. Abstentions count with the majority.

In a subsequent letter on Feb. 26 to the Covington Board, Garrison affirms his opposition to the proposal, arguing the Board Members were incurring on the district administration’s duty to manage the day-to-day of the district.

Haggard, for his own part, defended his relationship with EducateNKY.

“I’m not going to apologize for using my influence and the relationships that I’ve cultivated over an entire career to bring resources to our river city communities,” Haggard told LINK nky.

The issue was broached only briefly at the Covington Board meeting this week by Edelen, who said that she had spoken with people about the proposal since the Feb. 26 meeting.

“I just wanted to lift up their concerns to this group,” Edelen said. “Some noted that they were unaware of this effort, despite their mention of staff voice in the process. Some noted that they have not received some answers from leadership in the district related to the proposal, and some noted that they would like to have a more concrete plan before we move forward.”

LINK nky will report more on this topic as it develops.

McKenna Horsley of the Kentucky Lantern contributed reporting to his story.