Leaders of Kentucky’s largest school system are suing over a new law meant to limit their powers.
Yes, again.
Jefferson County school board members sued Kentucky’s education commissioner and attorney general Wednesday to block Senate Bill 1—legislation designed to strip them of some authority and give it to the district superintendent—from going into effect.
If that sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Lawmakers passed a nearly identical bill in 2022, which Jefferson County Public Schools’ (JCPS) Board of Education members sued to stop four summers ago. The lengthy court battle ended in December 2025, when the Kentucky Supreme Court reversed its prior decision and ruled the bill was unconstitutional.
The state’s top court decided lawmakers couldn’t single out a specific district unless they had a clear and compelling reason to do so. So, lawmakers refiled the bill at the start of the 2026 legislative session, but this time with a lengthy preamble of issues they attribute to JCPS in an attempt to provide that legal backing.
SB 1 would move a lot of the day-to-day operations of JCPS under the control of the district superintendent, Brian Yearwood, having the locally elected school board focus more on long-term planning.
Just like in the past, SB 1 is written so that it only applies to JCPS—stripping authority away from just the elected school board members in the Louisville area and not those in Kentucky’s other 170 school districts.
The board’s legal filing argues SB 1 “substantially restrict or outright strip the powers and authority of members of the [board] that are otherwise provided to every other school board in Kentucky … and would create special powers and privileges for the superintendent of the Jefferson County Public Schools that are otherwise denied to every other district superintendent in Kentucky.”
As written, board members argue the bill could give Yearwood and other future superintendents “virtually unchecked authority” over Kentucky’s largest school district and its roughly $2 billion budget.
SB 1 is one of dozens of new Kentucky laws that went into effect Wednesday. A separate bill, Senate Bill 4, that reduced the JCPS board from seven to five members, redrew their seat boundaries, and forced all of them to re-run for office this fall, went into effect this spring.
This story may be updated.
