It’s been a year since the four regulations that required school board members to complete annual training regarding charter schools took effect.
Under the state’s charter school law, school board members are charter school authorizers. After the charter school law passed, the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) promulgated regulations that require school board members to complete a certain number of charter school training hours each year.
Authorizers with eight or fewer years of experience must complete 12 hours of training annually. Years of authorizer experience is not necessarily the same as years of board service. Because the regulations took effect in 2018, all board members currently have fewer than eight years of charter authorizing experience.
However, board members were able to combine the authorizer training for 2018 and 2019 for a total of 12 hours required by Dec. 31, 2019. In 2020 and beyond, authorizer training will be tracked and reported to the Kentucky Board of Education on an annual basis, the same way existing board training is tracked and reported by KSBA.
When a board member reaches eight years of charter authorizer experience, the training requirement drops to eight hours per year.
Since the charter authorizer training requirements took effect, many school board members have questioned the need for so many hours dedicated to charter training. KSBA has heard our members concerns.
KSBA’s governmental relations staff has asked KDE if the number of hours can be reduced and KDE has indicated that it is open to the idea. Discussions on the matter are ongoing.
In the meantime, KSBA staff has been working to update all current required topics, including Ethics, Finance, and any other possible courses, to include charter information and therefore be approved by KDE to count toward charter requirements.
KDE has repeatedly stated that the regulation was intended to put charter authorizer training in line with existing requirements, for maximum overlap with the training topics already required.
Once a required topic course is approved for charter authorizer credit – this makes the course dual credit. For example, a charter approved Ethics course can count toward the required Ethics training AND charter requirements.
In addition to revamping courses to become dual credit, KSBA staff also developed new training courses to meet the charter requirements and topics that were first offered at Winter Symposium in November and will continue to be offered going forward.
To make meeting training requirements even more convenient for our members, KSBA will bring training to members across the state this spring. KSBA will hold a series of nine training sessions at Kentucky’s regional education cooperatives where members can attend three courses on the topics of Ethics, Finance and Charter Authorization for up to three hours of credit. Members can sign up for one, two or all three hours at a cost of $50 per hour.
The trainings will be held in late April and throughout May with more information available at
www.KSBA.org.
Finally, in an effort to help members keep track of their charter hours, KSBA staff has revamped the training reports to show the number of charter hours obtained, needed and the list of topics met. This new report was mailed out to all board members in February and will also be included in the full training reports mailed in April.
We understand that time is valuable, and our goal at KSBA is to make the legally required training as easy to obtain as possible. KSBA staff will continue to look for new ways to help our members not only meet the requirements, but to acquire the skills they need to best serve Kentucky’s public schools.