Budget subcommittee advances five education measures, including school-day makewhole and parental-accountability substitute

The Budget Review Subcommittee on Primary & Secondary Education & Workforce Development advanced five measures Thursday, approving House Bills 669, 621 (committee substitute), 758 and 809 and House Joint Resolution 49. The measures range from a local request that would make school districts whole for days lost after a shooting to a committee-substituted juvenile-justice provision that would allow courts the option to impose fines on parents and require mental-health contact for children adjudicated for terroristic threatening.

Representative Tom Smith, who introduced House Bill 669, told the committee the bill grew out of a September incident near I-75 that left multiple people shot and forced schools in his area to close. "I'm Tom Smith from the 80 Sixth District. I'm here today to discuss an important matter that happened in my district," Smith said in opening remarks. He told the committee districts sought guidance after extended closures and that the bill is intended to "make these school districts . . . made whole," not to create a precedent.

Why it matters: Committee-members and witnesses framed the bills as operational fixes to problems that local districts and agencies reported—lost instructional days, online and in-person threats that mobilize law enforcement and pull SROs from other schools, inequities in career-and-technical-education (CTE) funding calculations, and administrative delays in KHSAA transfer hearings.

House Bill 621 (committee substitute): parental accountability and juvenile disposition Representative Robert Duvall presented House Bill 621 and its committee substitute, which removed earlier references to homeschooling. Duvall summarized the substitute saying, "If a child is adjudicated for violation of terroristic threatening,…