Kentucky Legislature

We’ve already passed the halfway point of the 30-day legislative session. In this week’s edition of Capitol Chat we shine the spotlight on some controversial education-related bills; one of which (SB-150) spurred protests at two Lexington high schools. Also this week, an update on legislation concerning sports betting and medical cannabis. Our guest once again is the editor and publisher of the Frankfort-based Kentucky Gazette, Laura Cullen Glasscock.

The Kentucky Senate has passed a measure giving parents a pathway to challenge school instructional materials they consider unfit for children. The bill aims to ensure the right for parents to respond to books and other materials containing sexual content.

The Kentucky Senate has voted to create a new crime to punish hazing with jail time.

The Kentucky Senate has voted to create a layer of legislative oversight for relief funds, like the ones created by Gov. Andy Beshear to help people recover from tornadoes and flooding.

Kentucky's near-total abortion ban would be relaxed to allow exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest under a bill introduced Wednesday by a prominent lawmaker, who stopped short of predicting how his Republican colleagues will react to his proposal.

The House Education Committee on Tuesday advanced a measure that was touted as a “good first step” to attract and retain more educators to help overcome Kentucky's chronic teacher shortage. Karyn Czar has details.

The Kentucky Senate passed a bill Thursday allowing teachers to refuse to refer to transgender students by their preferred pronouns — a proposal that was touted as protecting free-speech rights in classrooms but denounced by a lawmaker whose transgender son died recently.

Kentucky lawmakers have advanced a bill aimed at giving them oversight of relief funds like the ones the governor created to help people recover from tornadoes and flooding. The measure sailed through a Senate committee Wednesday. A Kentucky lawmaker has introduced a bill to prosecute illegal abortions as homicides. The measure drew pushback from the state’s anti-abortion attorney general. He says it would wrongly subject Kentucky women to charges for terminating pregnancies.

Kentucky Gazette editor and publisher Laura Cullen Glasscock highlights a number of bills addressing what some Kentucky GOP legislators regard as pressing social and cultural issues in the commonwealth, some long-standing Democrat priorities showing up in this session and a few bills that may have bipartisan support.

Republican lawmakers in Kentucky have advanced a bill allowing teachers to misgender their transgender students. They plunged into the culturewar issue despite pleas to resist doing so from a colleague whose transgender son died.