As our children are heading back to school, the COVID-19 vaccine is become more available, and many of us are beginning to head back to our respective offices, our attention is rightly turning to recovery. For us at the Prichard Committee, that means education recovery. How do we take everything we’ve learned the last year, all the resources at our disposal, and all the creative capacity we can muster to stem the tide on learning loss, help our young people catch up, and accelerate learning to ensure we don’t have a lost generation?

This week on Innovations in Education, we held our first all-student panel discussion about how middle and high school students are coping with COVID-19. The Prichard Committee’s Student Voice Team (SVT), started creating the survey on this topic when schools closed for the pandemic in March. Over the past several weeks, the team has developed the survey in consultation with research experts from Kentucky and around the country.

Yesterday, the Senate Education Committee approved a committee substitute version of Senate Bill 158, and sent it forward for consideration on the Senate floor. We’ve revised our two-page overview of how the bill compares to Kentucky’s current law and practice.  The following are my thoughts on the bill as amended.