I spent last year substitute teaching. Here’s what Ky lawmakers get right and wrong. | Opinion

Sometimes people don’t realize that serving in the KY General Assembly is a part-time job. As citizen legislators, many of your state representatives and senators return to their districts after the legislative session and return to work. As a former teacher and a new member of the Education Committee, I decided to spend last school year substitute teaching in our public schools. It was an exhilarating, exhausting, eye-opening experience that reminded me that our policymakers are not focused on the right things. I also learned that if anyone in your class can do the splits, there’s a 100% chance they’re going to say, “Teacher, watch this!”

I substitute taught in 17 schools, from preschool to high school, about 10% of Jefferson County Public Schools. Having been in these classrooms, libraries, and gymnasiums, with hundreds of students, I can attest that any focus on pronoun usage or LGBTQ books are distractions from policymakers’ real obligations to our students.

I was pleasantly surprised that every single teacher left substantive lesson plans, but students had other ideas and I spent more time managing behavior.

In middle school, I broke up a craps game. In high school, I struggled to stop students from replaying videos on their phones of a fight that had happened at the class change. In elementary school, the rare outbursts and profanity were usually followed by tears, laying bare the trauma our kids are carrying and their difficulty putting it into words.

The challenges were structural, too. In one first period art class, I had 36 13-year-olds, with state law requiring that classroom doors be locked from the inside at all times to protect against mass shooters.

In another school, a fill-in-the-blank worksheet answer about the savage slave trade route known as the Middle Passage had me asking in disbelief, “This is the first time you all are hearing about the Middle Passage?”

At one school in my legislative district, some teachers recognized me and worried I was a mole from Frankfort. They should feel appreciated, not surveilled.

At almost every school, a teacher would ask me if I’d come back the next day to sub for them. There’s not just a teacher shortage — there’s also a sub shortage.

In many classrooms I was instructed to read aloud to students because they were unable to decipher grade-level content. One area the legislature continues to rightly focus is how Kentucky kids learn to read; my 3-year-old daughter will likely be taught to read differently than my 9-year-old daughter due to proactive changes from the General Assembly.

But there’s so much more the legislature can do to support teaching and learning, namely expanding access to early childhood education and shrinking class sizes. It’s early childhood education that teaches executive functioning skills, things like waiting one’s turn, respecting others’ bodies and belongings, and delaying gratification (like doing your worksheet before playing craps).

Shrinking class sizes, a task that would require recruiting and training a legion of new educators and massive investment from the state’s record budget surplus, would ensure that kids get the attention they deserve and build the relationships that shape them.

Kids are always hungry for more adults who care. At one elementary school, a little girl with skin the color of coffee beans asked me — a pale white woman — “Do you not think I’m beautiful because of the color of my skin?” I told her I thought she was gorgeous, she beamed and went back to decorating cupcakes on her computer.

Josie Raymond is a third-term state representative and former middle school teacher, a JCPS graduate, and a JCPS parent.