Kentucky's education commissioner says the state will step in and take over management of struggling Jefferson County schools as soon as August if progress isn't made soon.
The warning from Terry Holliday came Tuesday in a meeting with the Courier-Journal editorial board. A state analysis last week showed that 16 of the 18 low-performing schools in Jefferson County have made little or no progress since they were ordered to undergo overhauls.
Holliday last week called the situation "academic genocide." He told the newspaper he chose those words specifically as a way to get the community to realize and act on the seriousness of the situation.
In the past three years, 41 public schools in Kentucky have been selected for overhauls because of chronically poor academics.