Kentucky School Advocate
February 2022
In Conversation With features an interview between a leader or figure involved in public education and a representative of the Kentucky School Advocate.
State Representative
Tina Bojanowski, D-Louisville, has served in the state House since 2019. A special education teacher in Jefferson County, she serves on the House Education Committee and has degrees from the University of Louisville and Bellarmine University. Here, she talks about some of the bills she is sponsoring in the 2022 legislative session as well as her work on the School Funding Task Force.
Q. You’re the only legislator in the General Assembly right now who is an active teacher. How does that experience help you as a legislator?
A. It is a tremendous help because I can talk not just about theories. I can bring in what I see happening in my classroom. Having that balance between talking policy and bringing in what is the reality in elementary schools is very powerful.
Q. Juggling classroom teaching and serving as a state representative is challenging. How do you do it?
A. COVID makes it challenging and then, with being a special ed teacher, where kids have behavior issues, learning disabilities or attention disorders, it is just compounded. It is a lot being a teacher right now. I don’t shirk my teaching duties, and it is not like I can juggle anything during my work day, but I generally spend hours and hours on legislative work after school. I have a son with autism, and I’ve learned you try to live your regular life, and you do what you have to do when you have to do it.
Q. But you have juggled time-consuming commitments in the past?
A. Yes, in 2012, I started a PhD while I was working full time in education. I finished in 2017. So, working full time, I was working on a PhD and then ended up running for office.
Q. This past summer, you were on the School Funding Task Force, which looked at how the state funds public education. Were you satisfied with the task force’s final recommendations?
A. I was very satisfied and think the recommendations, like full funding for full-day kindergarten and some others – were very reasonable. Because of them, districts would have more funds to use for things that their students need. We really dug into funding, but I’m still not in the position nor do I have all the data to decide what we have to do as far as changes. To revisit this in another task force is essential. We didn’t even get to the biggest question, which is ‘What does it cost to provide what KERA (Kentucky Education Reform Act) demanded as far as providing an adequate education to every child?’ How did they come up with their original SEEK and was it based upon providing an adequate education to all students? It may mean redistribution of money or more money, but I don’t have the data or the research to say we’re funding education at a point where we can ensure that every child has an adequate education.
Q. Do you think some of the recommendations will be implemented during this session?
A. The House dropped their budget on Friday (Jan. 7) and while I haven’t looked at it fully, they do fully fund kindergarten for two years and there’s quite a bit more funding for transportation. I think they increase the SEEK as well. Of course, it still has to go through the legislative process.
Rep. Tina Bojanowski, R-Louisville, the only active K-12 teacher in the legislature is sponsoring a bill that would require boards to adopt policies on dyslexia and a bill to improve early literacy. (Provided by LRC) Q. You filed House Bill 138, which requires school boards to adopt a policy on dyslexia, and you’ve been an advocate for helping kids with dyslexia. Why do you think that this requirement is important?A.
We have kids who aren’t being screened adequately or given the right intervention and who have dyslexia or are struggling with learning to read. The current language on creating a policy now says a district ‘may’” rather than ‘shall.’ I asked KSBA staff how many boards have adopted a policy on dyslexia. They said none that they are aware of.
Q. So the point is to change a suggestion to a mandate?
A. We have 171 districts. They are not all going to do screening, just because it is a good idea. School boards have a lot to deal with. If something is not a mandate, they’re going to do what they’re required to do, because they’re juggling so much.
Q. What happens now when problems with reading become apparent?
A. Parents who have the social and financial capital get an assessment and tutoring for their child, but the children whose families don’t have the means often end up not learning how to read, even though research shows that all but about 5% of our kids can learn how to read. We’re relegating some kids to not succeed because we are not doing something as simple as screening. From what I understand, by the time a child is 6 years old, an appropriate screening can help predict if they’re going to struggle with learning to read. That screening is not done on the Brigance Kindergarten Screen that the state uses.
Q. Speaking of literacy, you are also a sponsor of HB226, an early literacy bill. Educators and researchers have been rethinking how to teach reading, with more educators embracing phonics instruction as opposed to balanced literacy, which relies more on cueing in which students are encouraged to guess at the words or infer from pictures. Some have called this the “reading wars.” What are your thoughts?
A. Balanced literacy curriculum, commonly used in our state and reading recovery, takes an approach of go-from-the-whole and then deal with some of the parts of reading. So a student reading at the first level might read ‘The spaceship is flying.’ There’s nothing they can decode in that sentence. They are trained to look at the picture to try to figure out a word, to look at the first letter of the word and reread the sentence for context. The other camp, developed in the dyslexic community, is called structured literacy. You start with the part and build up to the whole. Children learn how groups of letters sound. I have a student who’s a new reader. I taught him the sound that DGE makes, and he decoded the word. So if he knows the sound those letters make, he can read other DGE words and he’s not predicting them based on a picture. Kids need to have a lot of opportunities to read things they can actually decode.
Q. As a teacher, you’ve been concerned about how much state-required testing we have in schools, so you filed HB 128 to allow the assessment system to be a series of assessments through the year, rather than one at the end of the year, if the U.S. Department of Education would agree. How do you think this change would improve teaching and learning?
A. All year long, we’re preparing children for an assessment that is high stakes. But teachers don’t even get to look at results nor do they get detailed information about specific students. I think we need to revamp accountability and get away from the high-stakes accountability tests. In the interim, and I have it in the bill, as I do, a lot of the districts already do MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) testing. We do it in JCPS in reading and math, three times a year, and it takes a little over an hour per test. It does not require extra training.
This alternate assessment would be a series of formative assessments done three times a year with the data coming back to teachers the next day so they can use it to drive instruction for their children who have struggles in specific areas.
I got an estimate from KDE that the three-hour training for teachers to do the training for K-Prep is about $7 million. We are spending millions for an assessment that is nothing more than an accountability list for the state and does nothing from a school perspective or a teacher perspective to drive instruction.
Q. What kind of feedback have you gotten on this?
A. There is an appetite, both with some members of the House and some in the Senate and not just in my own party, to make some big changes. We need accountability measures that truly measure all of our students.