Flood of calls forces Senate to pass state bill
Grass roots landslide brings KERA advocates to their knees
From Kentucky Citizen Digest, March, 1998

State Sen. Vernie McGaha didn’t make any bones about why he was voting for Senate Bill 243. As he stood at his desk on the floor of the Senate explaining his ‘yes’ vote on the bill, he held in one hand a small piece of paper just large enough to accommodate two numbers, 1781 and 73. The first number represented calls in favor of the bill. The second number represented calls against it.

Not too much question where the public was standing on this issue.

The bill passed 35 to 1, an amazing fact when you consider that just several months before, stalwart defenders of KERA and the KIRIS tests were still just that: stalwart. The transformation began when State Sen. Gex Williams, a Republican from Verona and a congressional candidate for Rep. Jim Bunning’s seat in the 4th district (Bunning is vacating his seat in order to run for the U. S. Senate), launched a grass roots campaign to do away with the test.

The were thousands of calls to legislators in support of Senate Bill 113, a bill sponsored by Williams that would have done away with the KIRIS tests entirely for the 1998-1999 school year. Some Senate Democrats, however, balked at the idea of such a drastic action. But knowing that a ‘No’ vote on SB 113 would be political suicide, opponents of the bill worked to fashion a compromise that included some elements of SB 113, and that, in addition, made substantial long-term changes to the tests.

The result was a bill that garnered the support not only of hard-core KERA defenders such as Senate Minority Floor Leader David Karem, but of avowed enemies of the test like Gex “Jay” Williams.

The fate of the SB 243, the compromise bill, is still uncertain, however. After garnering momentum from a strong Senate vote, the bill was sent to the House of Representatives, where there are other Democratic leaders with somewhat different ideas.

Rep. Harry Moberly of Richmond, chairman of the powerful House Appropriations and Revenue Committee, is considered to be the most influential member of the House on education issues. Moberly has indicated that he opposes many of the more drastic measures of SB 243 and has offered his own solution to some of the problems with KIRIS with the much more moderate House Bill 627.

Even with powerful House members such as Moberly opposed to SB 243, support for more radical changes to the test seems to be building among rank and file House members, many of whom have received over a thousand calls in favor of doing away with the KIRIS tests.

A testing bill of some kind is likely to emerge from the House, but ultimately the issue will probably end up in a conference committee, a committee made up of members of both the House and the Senate responsible for ironing out differences between House and Senate bills.

What happens in the tug-of-war that might ensue between the two chambers is anybody’s guess.
 

Key Family Foundation Contacts: Kent Ostrander, Executive Director Martin Cothran, Senior Associate Policy Analyst