Letter to the Editor: ‘The Chairperson of the House Education Committee’

(Letter to the Editor By David O. Smith, Corbin, KY)

The Kentucky Legislature will be commencing its annual session in January 2021. Our State Republican Representative, Regina Huff, will be serving as the Chairperson of the House Education Committee.

The citizens of her District and the citizens of Kentucky need to know what action she plans to take and what legislation she intends to introduce or sponsor through her Committee to the floor of the House of Representatives and onto the Kentucky Senate to bring the Commonwealth of Kentucky from the bottom third in education in the United States to the top third.

In the years she has served as State Representative as a retired teacher, this has not happened. However, she is now in a powerful position from which she can benefit every student in this state. This has to be the goal, and she has to be innovative and succeed in this endeavor.

Kentucky deserves a better educational system for our children, and it will reap monumental benefits for our state. She will not have Pence to assist her, but she still has Mitch McConnell for federal assistance. Representative Huff has a super majority in the Kentucky House and Senate to pass her Committee’s educational plan.

Hopefully, her plan to propel Kentucky into the top third of the nation in education will not include charter schools, as Betsy Devos is gone, and that is not going to help the children in Whitley County, Knott County or Owsley County. Our children need a real plan to drastically improve their education, not just teach the state testing.

This is a serious undertaking and hopefully our representative is up to the task. We will know in a few months. I urge everyone to talk with her, read her newspaper column and her Facebook page, to encourage her to meet this goal, and to determine if she meets the needs of our children’s education.

It is time to bring top rate education home and Whitley County is counting on our representative to do that for Kentucky.