Will Powers and Student Voices Leading Policy Change in KY

Will Powers

Adult Policy Partner

Kentucky Student Voice Team

Quote of the Podcast: 

“I believe in angels, something good in everything I see”

Introduction of Guest BIO – 

Will Powers is a graduate of Occidental College, where he studied diplomacy and world affairs and graduated as an Obama Scholar. He has worked for the Brookings Institution, Blue Haven Initiative, and the House Foreign Affairs Committee advancing social impact through policy making. Will is currently the policy and public engagement partner for the Kentucky Student Voice Team helping lead the Rose Revival campaign and supporting high school students to facilitate a series of public hearings related to issues raised in KSVT's recently-filed legal complaint, Kentucky Student Voice Team v. The Commonwealth of Kentucky.

Interview

Agents of Change: Leaders/Innovators

•  30,000 Ft. View – Why do we, as a society invest in education?
• What drew you to education?
• KSVT Legislation
• Addressing skepticism about the KSVT litigation (learned pessimism about systematic reform)
• What are the biggest challenges to you?
• What would you like decision-makers to know?

Podcast/book shoutouts

Books: The Places in Between by Rory Stewart

Mobilizing Citizens for Better Schools

Education Perspectives is edited by Shashank P

Intro and Outro by Dynamix Productions

Transcript

Liza Holland:
Welcome to education perspectives. I am your host, Liza Holland.

This is a podcast that explores the role of education in our society from a variety of lenses. Education needs to evolve to meet the needs of today and the future. Solving such huge issues requires understanding. Join me as we begin to explore the many perspectives of education.

Liza Holland:
Will Powers is a graduate of Occidental College where he studied diplomacy and world affairs and graduated as an Obama scholar. He has worked for the Brookings Institution, Blue Haven Initiative, and the House Foreign Affairs Committee advancing social impact through policy making. Will is currently the policy and public engagement partner for the Kentucky student voice team, helping lead the Rose Revival campaign and supporting high school students to facilitate series of public hearings related to issues raised in KSVT's recently filed legal complaint, Kentucky student voice team versus the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Well, Will Powers, welcome to education perspectives.

Will Powers:
Thank you so much for having me.

Liza Holland:
Oh, I'm delighted, and I'm so excited because talk about the, penultimate of student voice. We've got a lot to talk about today. But let me ask you my question I ask every guest. From a 30,000 foot view, why do you think that we as a society need to invest in education?

Will Powers:
Yeah. So I would speak to my personal experience. I grew up in Somerset, Kentucky, which is a pretty small community in Southeastern Kentucky. And I grew up in a family, a little very lucky to have an educated mother and a and a brother who is older than me going to college. So I understood then the importance of education, which was not something that everyone who I grew up with, friends or family, had received. And it was joining the Kentucky student voice team in high school where I saw nearly a decade on now from joining as a as a high schooler, I saw I got to really interact with students from Lexington and Louisville for the first time. And I saw this huge disparity in opportunity, especially related to post secondary transitions. These students were talking about going to Harvard, going to Princeton, going to Yale, things that were not even in my vocabulary as a student in Somerset.

Will Powers:
So I started to realize, oh, this is a factor or a byproduct of the kind of education they are receiving and the kind of larger culture that they grew up in, which told them these things are possible because of the education you receive. And I didn't see that reflected in Somerset, but I felt like still that could be the case. The education quality was there in the high school, but the possibilities and opportunities weren't made aware. So I I that really started me on this on this pathway.

Liza Holland:
Boy, that's exciting. And it is it is amazing what that that group has done. Can you tell listeners who maybe are not familiar what the Kentucky student voice team is?

Will Powers:
Yeah. So the Kentucky student voice team formed thirteen years ago in a coffee shop with our great, founder and board chair, Andrew Brennan, who I feel like anytime I say his name, about four people appear who know who he is, and Rachel Bellen, who's our managing partner, our adult partner, we like to call her. And, they felt like as education stakeholders, they being the students who approach Rachel, that should have a voice in education policy decision making. And, Rachel agreed, and they brought this proposal to start a student group to the Pritchard Committee at the time and became the Pritchard Committee student voice team. In 2021, we broke off from the Pritchard Committee and became our own independent five zero one c three organization, completely youth led, cogenerationally sustained, we like to say. So I am, defined as an adult partner. In many cases, I would not be an adult partner. But as a 24 year old, I get to come back to the work and support the students while they're doing the 8AM to 3PM in school, and then I support them all the way up until usually midnight when they get back from their clubs and various engagements.

Will Powers:
So we do policy research, and storytelling to create more just and democratic schools here in Kentucky, and we have about a 20 or so middle and high school members from across the state who opt in to join. We're not like a school club or anything. People see our website, hear about it from a friend. They shoot us an email. They join us on Slack, on Zoom. We meet virtually, and then we have these in person gatherings every now and then to, either like we were last weekend in Lexington hosting a hearing on civic education or where we'll be in a month at the Franklin County Circuit Court House, at the hearing for our KSVT versus Commonwealth of Kentucky litigation.

Liza Holland:
Boy, that's so exciting. And I I definitely want to dig in in detail about that, but I was kind of fascinated reading your bio about some of the experience that you have, have gotten outside of Kentucky and, or at least, tangentially there. Tell us a little bit about your work, like, with the Brookings Institution and the House Foreign Affairs Committee, those sorts of things, because that's a great skill set to be bringing back to Kentucky student voice team.

Will Powers:
Yeah. So I studied diplomacy and world affairs in undergrad, and and I always had a an understanding that I wanted to go into. I wanted to broaden my horizons from just understanding education in the context of Somerset or of Kentucky, but in, in the world as a whole. And so I got involved in, studying international development efforts related to sustainable development goal four, which is around the access to quality education for all, which is very similar to the Rose case and the right to an adequate education here in Kentucky. So I studied with a professor at Occidental College and studied specifically how, free primary school was rolled out in Uganda. And from there, I got this perspective on how the delivery of education services is really one size fits all in international development, and it doesn't work. And that's not just the case for international development. It's that way in The United States and with within individual districts and county levels or city levels.

Will Powers:
So I saw that through line, and I really wanted to discover it more. So I worked at the Brookings Institution specifically studying, social impact bonds, which are these innovative finance tools to do some of these education development projects in other countries. Those specifically, these bonds that I studied were US based and how, private companies and public, entities could work together to increase, support for remedial learning. So anyhoo, all of my work, even on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which was very minimal, I should I should say that I was a freshman in college at the time, and this was just before COVID started. So I only got to do a semester of that internship. But, really, I had I had this narrowed focus. I had never left the country until even last year, but I had really not engaged with other cultures, let alone international cultures, and I wanted to get that out of my college experience. I felt like I did that.

Will Powers:
I I brought my perspective. I learned a lot of new things, and I took those skills back with me to Kentucky into this current role. And I think we've built a network that is nationwide but is also international. We joined I pushed really hard for the student voice team to join Catalyst twenty thirty, which is a group of international group of organizations and individuals working towards meeting those sustainable development goals by 2030, specifically us working on SDG four around the universal access to education. And I fundamentally believe that at the very least, if you're doing work in a local community or statewide, the scope of your work is not international. The work that you're doing can be helpful to an international audience if you're letting them know the strategies that you're using to engage youth or the barriers that you had to overcome. Usually, those are barriers that people face in other countries in different context, but your advice and your help can be useful and vice versa to us. So I've tried to infuse that into the work we do with the Kentucky student voice team, and that was definitely something I I got from my work, during my undergraduate, career.

Liza Holland:
That's fantastic. And what a gift to the, the current Kentucky student voice team, to be able to get that kind of broadened exposure, etcetera. That's wonderful. So we were lucky enough to have Luisa on to talk a little bit about the initial study and whatnot around the Rose decision and where you guys were coming from. But, we had not it had not gotten to the point where you were looking at legislation. So can you tell us a little bit about why the Kentucky student voice team decided to actually file a lawsuit?

Will Powers:
Yeah. So I I'll try not to regurgitate what Luisa has already said, and and Luisa will have said it 20 times better than I could ever put it. She is wonderful. But we we embarked upon this journey a a year or two ago with, we like to call them the Mikes, Michael Gregory, Michael Rabell, who are our two legal advisers, reached out to us and said, you know, Kentucky has this unique right to an adequate education in our constitution. Is that being upheld? So they came to us with a question, and we wanted to answer that question for them. We knew we couldn't do it alone, and we knew that, really, 80% of that question had already been answered by the very own statistics from the Department of Education here in Kentucky and by our partner organizations. But we really wanted to dig into these seven capacities, which are seven components or skills that the Kentucky constitution says each student must graduate with. Most of the analysis of the Rose case focuses on the financial aspects.

Will Powers:
How are the how is the seek funding formula holding up thirty years on from CARA? And we understood that to be pretty plainly inequitable. The research that has come out from that is it didn't bear repeating from us. So we wanted to really get into what are the impacts of the funding inequities on the quality of education. So we hosted those six, community forums across the state. We engaged over 3,000 individual education stakeholders through our surveys and interviews. We synthesized and conducted a meta analysis of the data that was already out there from our partners on these seven capacities. And we came to the decision with the students as our key decision maker in this that we would be an organizational plaintiff and that we would, file this case alongside 13 individual plaintiffs who are students themselves in the state of Kentucky. And and we really felt fundamentally that the moment calls for systemic change.

Will Powers:
Everything in the nineties that led us to Rose is true today, if not twofold. And we believe that if the state legislature is unable to take those actions or won't take those actions and they've not in the past five or six years, then we ought to use the other tool in our toolbox to bring about this change, which is litigation. So we filed that litigation in January, and it doesn't mean we're not going to be working in the legislative session or we're not going to be doing research or storytelling or advocacy. It actually makes those efforts even more important now. But now we have we have kind of a timetable that says this is when we could get a decision. In our case, we want a favorable decision. And then by the time we get that four or five years, we want to have created a pathway for the state legislature to take to say this is the path that Kentuckians want to go down. They want an adequate civic education, which means actually requiring a course in high school, for graduation.

Will Powers:
They want, adequate mental health resources, which means meeting the one counselor to 250 student ratio in Kentucky schools and funding that mandate. So that is what the case is about. That's what this public engagement campaign is about. It's about we've outlined the problems. We've identified them in the legal complaint. Now we don't wanna harp on what's wrong with Kentucky's education system for the next four years. People know that. We wanna talk about the possibilities of what our future can look like here in Kentucky based on what's already happening in schools across the state.

Will Powers:
So, like, at our hearing last weekend, Sherry McPherson, a great educator in Fayette County Schools at Lafayette High School, came and spoke to us about the things she's already doing in her classes to instill a sense of civic, preparedness in her students. And that's something that, yes, could require legislation, but there are also practices, guidelines, values, morals that teachers and that educators can uphold in their classroom to get us closer to the Rose decision that may not require legislation. So we want to uphold those things. We want to make sure that people are are taking an an asset based view of our education system, an affirmative view. And so that's where we move from here.

Liza Holland:
Boy, that's marvelous. I was pretty devastated that I wasn't able to be at that that town hall. Tell me what other highlights kind of came out of that.

Will Powers:
Yeah. So we had four expert witnesses, Richard Young, who is at CivicLex, Sherry McPherson, an educator, Carly Muterites, who is the head Education Coalition, former educator in Fayette County, and Vontela Thomas, the director of the student y. And, I mean, my foremost takeaway is how wonderful are our students. They are just they served as examiners kind of in a role that you would traditionally see a legislator, a lawmaker in in a, legislative committee hearing. And they were test they were examining these expert witnesses, and they did such a wonderful job at doing that. But what really stuck out to me I keep coming back to Richard Young's testimony. He talked about how civic preparedness and civic education is more than just learning about the government and learning about political processes, learning about culture and history, which was consistent amongst all our experts. But what he brought up that I thought was so unique was talking about in our education system, we should be talking about civics as a, knowing who when to call 311 when there's a pothole in the road, knowing who to call when your cat's stuck in the tree, knowing who to call when your neighbor needs help with something, or knowing how to be an engaged neighbor, knowing where the resources are to figure out who's on the board of education and how do I get in touch with them.

Will Powers:
But instilling in our education system that civic careers are good careers, are careers that we should aspire to. And in this moment, in Lexington in Lexington, in particular, Richard made the point, three out of the five biggest employers are civic institutions, the University of Kentucky, the county government, and the Fayette County public schools. And those are careers that we should frame in that manner and also let people know that these careers are are things that are let me back up. You don't need to. We oftentimes kind of view it as college or career and technical. And I think in those buckets, we miss we miss the arts. We miss but we also miss these civic these civic careers. And I want us as a culture to be able to articulate that being civically minded does not always mean being politically involved.

Will Powers:
It can mean being involved in your community at large. It can mean helping the people in your neighborhood, helping the people in your family, helping your friends out in a way that is based in community and based in this collective. So I thought Richard articulated that much better than even I can regurgitate it here to you. So, yeah, that stuck with me amongst so many other things.

Liza Holland:
I think that is an incredibly classic sound bite, especially because we are finding ourselves at such a point in our history where polarization is so rampant. Kinda starting with that, where can we just help each other out? Where can we help each other as neighbors, be a civically minded good citizen, is a really solid foundation to to bring people together. I love that. Richard is is phenomenal, and he's always coming up with those wonderful things, but that's that's a particularly stellar one. I love that. So you and I were talking a little bit about the fact that there are some skeptics out there. What in the world are high schoolers doing messing with, you know, bringing a lawsuit? What do you say to the naysayers that, that that don't understand why it's important for students to be at the root of this?

Will Powers:
Yeah. Well, first, I would validate their concern because I I had the same concern when the Mikes approached us with this opportunity, which is, what is truly possible in today's political environment and really in our information ecosystem at large? When you look at the Rose case in the nineties, what stuck out stuck out to me in reading Mobilizing Citizens for Better Schools, which talks about that public engagement process, which led to the Rose decision, which led to the Kentucky Education Reform Act, was that there was a more robust civic ecosystem then than there is now. There were groups of neighbors meeting weekly to talk about what was going on in the state of Kentucky. There were groups in each city that were meeting, to talk about how they could, influence education policy, and I believe that those groups are still there. They're just the ecosystem that connects them to the student voice team to then the Kentucky Education Organization aren't existing anymore. Those ties have been withered. So the possibility of change has become more distant to people. So I acknowledge that, and I understand that to any time that you are going up against the status quo against the, in this case, the state government, that there are interested parties that don't want the status quo to change, that want to uphold their relationships with members of the state government or their financial benefits from being a part of the status quo.

Will Powers:
And so we understood that going into this, that it was a risk to take for those two reasons that we're coming up against this, this great mysterious entity that is the status quo and that we are, taking a risk in an environment that has become increasingly risk averse, especially for, quote, unquote, our side. And but what amendment two told us in my mind was what the state legislature has been serving up for the past decade or so is not something that the con the people of Kentucky wanna eat. And they roundly rejected that in November. Every single county voting no on amendment two overwhelmingly, I think the closest county was McCrary County, and that was still a a 12 victory for the no side. And we felt like, okay. The ball is in our court now. The Kentucky state government has gone on the offensive. They have time after time attacked teachers, attacked students, tried to limit the teaching of controversial topics, tried to, limit how the, educators can speak about x, y, and z, or how much they get paid, or what their pension benefits look like.

Will Powers:
So it's time for us as pro public school advocates who just ran a uber successful political campaign to put our to put our proposal on the table. So we felt as students, as high school students, this is the best entity to do that because what are they gonna say about teachers unions? Oh, they're self interested. They're too political. They only want their best their financial bottom line, which I'm not sure why that should be a disqualifier, but that's what they'll say. And what would they say about CBE who brought the original Rose case? Oh, they're always suing us. They're blah blah blah. So we thought, well, how are you going to what angle are you going to take with students? We know now because we've received their motions to dismiss that they think, oh, these students this is not actual harm, and these students should be suing individual educators and administrators. But what a terrible point to argue in the public ecosystem.

Will Powers:
So we're glad to have that battle with them, and they could only have that battle if we brought this case. So we are showing really their true colors, which is we believe that individual educators, individual administrators are falling short. It's not our fault as the system. And they wouldn't had to admitted those things had it been brought by CBE, had it been brought by KEA or JCTA, the three of which are great partners of ours and we greatly respect. So I would say that that is why the student voice team felt compelled specifically to bring this case. And then as an organization so that we could protect those 13 individual plaintiffs, those student plaintiffs that it wasn't one student's last name versus Commonwealth of Kentucky. It's the Kentucky student voice team, and we can serve as that entity that takes some of that energy, but also some of that backlash. So and I would say this.

Will Powers:
Ultimately, we have a example in our not so recent past in the nineties of a time that Kentucky was not just coming together as a collective to better our education system. Yes. We did that, but we became a national model. And eight other states around the country ended up adopting the Rose provisions. Those states are not our neighbors, Tennessee or Indiana. Those are states that span the spectrum of political ideology, of demographic, of geography. And we ought to, knowing that that is possible, knowing because we've done it before, Many of the same people who are a part of the Rose, initial Rose decision are still fighting that fight today, so they know that it's possible. We ought to do it when the time tells us it is now.

Will Powers:
And I think we are seeing in the data that one and five Kentucky high schoolers does not have access to an arts class. One and five Kentucky high schoolers has reported considered taking their lives in the past year. Over a hundred individual Kentucky high schoolers go be way beyond the one to 400 mental health counselor to student ratio. That one, I I believe it's around 60% of our students are proficient in reading and even lower in math at by ninth grade. That's unacceptable. And it's not enough to say, well well, each year, we we increase by 4%, and then we lose maybe 3% the next year. We need wholesale changes to our education system that mean we're not working from a baseline that's inadequate. And and that's to say, our educators, our teachers, the people who work in our schools, we do not hear students come up to us and say, oh, they're not doing their job.

Will Powers:
They're not they're terrible. On case to case basis, do we hear this? Yes. But what we largely hear is they're under resourced, they're underpaid, they're not adequately supported, and they're given standards and curriculum which are not with in keeping with what is supposed to be provided in those seven capacities of the Rose decision. So we think on behalf of Kentucky students, but also on behalf of our taxpayers, our educators, and our administrators, it's time for a systemic change.

Liza Holland:
You are so incredibly eloquent because, boy, isn't that the the case? It really, really is. And I think about the even the measurements of what we are choosing to measure are not aligned with with what the needs of our time are. And so what a a courageous thing to do as an organization. And kudos to you, and kudos to all of the other adult partners that are, are helping along there. So this obviously is the it's as far as I know, is the first time that you've actually brought legislation. As far as the delving into this area, what do you think the biggest challenges were as far as as actually getting it to fruition?

Will Powers:
Yeah. I would say what shocked me the most was and and my biggest skepticism was, how in the world are we going to find 13 or more high school students who are willing to sue the state of Kentucky? I know when I was in high school, I probably would have thought I would be gung ho for that, and then I would have sat down with the lawyers and thought, oh, wait a minute. What am I actually doing? Especially, because if you're under 18, you have to have your parents sign on. And I know my parents well. They would not have wanted to do that when I was in high school either. So I thought the one, the willingness of the Kentucky student voice team students, but also the many plaintiffs who are part of the case who are not a part of the Kentucky student voice team, who organically reached out to us and got connected and said, oh, I want to be a part of this proactively. Like, yes. I do want to sue them because I have seen the harm.

Will Powers:
I think that says something about our education system and not a positive way. I think if people are scrambling to sue because of the quality of education that they've received, then there's something seriously wrong. And we saw this when we filed the case and when LAX eighteen or WKYT would post the link to their news story on their social medias. If you went through and read the comments, there were so many people, people who were in their forties or fifties, but also people who are currently in school saying, how do I submit my story? How do I become a part of this case? This has been going on for x y z many years. So I thought that was going to be a challenge. It ended up not being a huge challenge, and maybe the lawyers would disagree with me on that because they did most of the plaintiff mining. But I would say for me, the biggest challenge is one that we've not faced yet, and one that is theoretical, which is if we brought this case because we do not trust the state legislature to do their job and to actually improve our education system in a way that is meeting the moment, then we bring litigation. But where does litigation end up ultimately back with the state legislature? If we get a favorable court decision, they will tell the state legislature to remedy these unconstitutionalities.

Will Powers:
They won't the court doesn't get to create the law themselves, as you know. And so we understand that in the time between now and a decision, something has to change or multiple things have to change. We cannot. If we were in a a super speedy justice system and we received a favorable decision in a week's time, we understand that that mandate would probably not do much to sway the Kentucky state legislature, or that is that is my great fear. But what I do understand is that in the interim between now and a decision, we can build the political power, the public power, specifically to make sure the Kentucky state legislature knows that this decision is telling you to go down this pathway. We don't want it to get to a point where they get a decision and they look and they have, like, 17 different crossroads to go down. And they say, okay. Well, this one's more aligned with our political interests, so let's do this, and let's double down on what we've been doing for the past five or six years.

Will Powers:
And there's ways to mitigate that in the court by asking for a special master that reviews and goes over the legislation that would be passed in response to a court decision. But, ultimately, they could ignore the special master if they wanted to. We're seeing something that happened like that in Ohio regarding gerrymandering. So what we really need to do is to do what we did on amendment two, which was speak the language of our politicians, which is electoral, and tell them in that language, here's what we want. Here's how we view our public schools. And so do I think that looks like something on the ballot? No. So it can't be a complete and total replication of what happened with amendment two. It has to be something more organic where people themselves are deciding, hey.

Will Powers:
I think I'm gonna start having conversations about what my I want my education system to look like because I know that in three or four years, we might have the opportunity to completely and wholly reconstruct our education system. So at first, it's about let's accept the premise that we have set out, which is we could have a decision that completely changes our education system. Let's accept that that is possible, and let's start asking ourselves, what do we want out of that possibility? What do we want our education system to look like? And it sounds very simple. Oh, just start thinking about what you want. That doesn't sound very revolutionary. But I think it is because you are suspending your disbelief for a second and saying, okay. Let's say this does happen. And we we think obviously, we brought this case, so we think it will happen.

Will Powers:
And then let's say with that suspended disbelief, what do we want out of it? And I think oftentimes we ask ourselves the question, what do we want? And we put so many constraints on what we think we can have. And we wanna tell people here in Kentucky, no. Look what happened with the Rose decision. They didn't just say, okay. Here, take this part out and this part out, but keep these parts. It was a full scale. This is unconstitutional. You must recreate this.

Will Powers:
So if we build from the ground up, I think letting people know that, hey. This is a possibility to completely reconstruct our education system because you have a constitutional right and because there are high schoolers fighting for that constitutional right, that's a very powerful thing. I think that gets people involved in something that gets people discussing, the case. It gets people empowered because they know their rights, but it also gets people thinking about what they want for their child, what they want for themselves, what an educator wants for the students that they teach. So we believe that first process or first step in that process is starting these hearings, having this Rose Revival two point o public engagement campaign where we're moving to start identifying what's possible, what could these solutions look like, and then moving towards rallying around what we've heard from the people of Kentucky and uplifting a vision of our public education system that we can bring to the state legislature and say, hey. We've done the legwork for you. We've traveled the state. We've talked to these, partners, and we've come up with a vision that is not infused with political ideology, but is infused with the hopes and dreams of Kentuckians themselves.

Will Powers:
And and I'll hearken back to amendment two just to say, I believe that's what amendment two has done in the sense that I think it put a political straight jacket on those state legislators for this current session to tell them, okay, you've got to take a step back from types of legislation you're passing to fundamentally overhaul our accountability system or the funding system to make it performance based funding. They understand now that that's unpalatable. So I I think we can accept the premise that our state legislators are not immovable objects. We just have to figure out a way to move them in the time between now and a decision. I think we have the road map because we've done it here in Kentucky once before, but it'll require more. The Kentucky student voice team is not the Pritchard committee. We do not have the apparatus that Pritchard had in the nineties to push forward this public engagement system system or public engagement campaign. So we need the support of partners like Pritchard, of KEA, of JCTA, but also of individual community members like yourself who you're maybe you're not connected to an education org specifically, but you have a wide swath of connections in your community and your neighborhood with people who are in, who are education stakeholders broadly.

Will Powers:
We cannot just be preaching to the choir. The choir is singing the same hymn that we are. We have got to go into the other churches and expand our congregation and sing in 20 different hymns at the same time and understand that not everything that the student voice team has fought for is going to be what the people of Kentucky want their education to system to look like. But, fundamentally, what the student voice team is fighting for is those stakeholders, those individuals, those organizations to have a meaningful seat at the table when we restructure our education system as a whole, which we believe we should do.

Liza Holland:
That is so incredibly powerful, and what an experience what a life experience for these students who are involved. And, again, you know, the bravery strikes me. And they are the ultimate consumers of our education system and can probably best tell us what's working and what's not, and it's it's wonderful to hear their voices out there. You have given me a lot of good responses to this question, but I wanna go ahead and and offer the last one. What would you specifically like decision makers to know that we haven't talked about already?

Will Powers:
I would like them to know that the student voice team doesn't see them as enemies in this work. We I think it's so easy for us to to pick out a villain and to say, oh, they have failed their constitutional responsibility. And, ultimately, we believe that they have. But they, in this circumstances, a decades long group of individuals. It has been Republicans, Democrats, independents, nonpartisan. It has been wholesale, the effect on our education system and and the care the actors which have brought these effects on our education system now. So I want the decision makers of today to know that it's not your fault, but you are in a burning house. And if you sit there and let it burn, even if you didn't strike the match, you are complicit in the burning of that house.

Will Powers:
So it is a wonderful opportunity for them now to say, hey. We can do what our predecessors did in the nineties and create this generational precedent for young people, but also for our society as a whole to say, we value education so much that we will take this drastic step, and it is drastic to completely overhaul your education system. Most states never do that, let alone do that twice in the span of thirty years. So I think it's an incredible opportunity for our leaders. One, for them I mean, I'm reading about all the legislators from the Rose decision. So you can be in history books and you can you can be talked about thirty years from now. But, also, the more importantly, you are setting up a generation of students for success both here in Kentucky but nationwide because you are setting a model for every state like we did with the original Rose decision of this is how we can reform. Because make no mistake, Kentucky is not the only state that faces these issues.

Will Powers:
And you could say on and and some of the issues related to achievement and attainment that we've done pretty well compared to our neighboring states. But we can be the only state that has taken this proactive, drastic change to remedy these issues and so that our neighbors and that the rest of the states in the country and the international, to go back to my earlier point, can say this is the model for change. This is the road that we can take, and this was led by students. And I just hope that it doesn't get lost in in all this talk of, quote, unquote, failing education system that these failures are not can never be pinpointed on one person, one entity, one body, one organization. But we all have the responsibility to work to remedy those. So it's an incredible opportunity, I think, for our decision makers. I hope they approach it with due diligence. I believe that they will.

Will Powers:
I understand that they might differ on ideology or or pathway or, or how we get to this North Star, but I believe that they want to get there, that they want the best for Kentucky students. And knowing that, I think, this is just an open invitation to them to to join this conversation, to to listen, but to also, to be heard, to tell us what their constraints are.

Liza Holland:
Well, that is a fabulous call to action action to our legislators to really step up and step beyond politics to be statesmen and women.

Will Powers:
Absolutely.

Liza Holland:
That is a perfect place for us to end this conversation, Will. Thank you. Thanks so much for taking the time, and we will continue to, to keep pace as things move forward with this legislation.

Will Powers:
Well, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Liza Holland:
Thank you so much for listening to this listening to this episode of education perspectives. Feel free to share your thoughts on our Facebook page. Let us know which education perspectives you would like to hear or share. Please subscribe and share with your friends.