Substitute Teachers Lounge
Substitute Teachers Lounge
KY Bill 181 & Teachers Communicating with Students 2025/26
Ever wonder how a well-meaning law can create unexpected headaches for educators? This episode dives into Kentucky's new Senate Bill 181, which passed unanimously but has left teachers struggling with how to efficiently communicate with students.
It is Greg Collins, episode 298 of Substitute Teacher's Lounge. It is July 28, 2025. Today we want to try to accomplish two things. I'm going to tell you how to recommend, I guess, how to communicate with the class of 2026. You can't communicate with them like we did back in my day. Then, of all things, we're going to talk about Kentucky Senate Bill 181, which has to do with how teachers can communicate with students. The bill itself was done for very good reasons, but maybe not completely thought through, and it's got the teachers all tore up Substitute teacher's loud.
Greg:All right now, before we get started, I'll tell you a little Talk about communication gone wrong. You always have to be conscious about the way things come across on social media. I told you that about a month ago my wife went on the El Camino Trail, portugal, to Spain, with some friends with one friend and then made a lot more friends while she was there, and she does something like that every summer. And when she does that I go to my element, which is Orlando, met one of my sons down there and we hit Epic Universe and had some fun in the Disney area and all that kind of stuff. But when we got back my daughter had asked me the question have you heard from mom lately? And I said something to the effect of never text me again. Well, to her, she knew that that had to be a mistake, because it was like I was telling my daughter never text me again, when really what I was saying was my wife never text me again. Now, I did that because we have become so sloppy in the way we communicate on social media that I shortcut my answer. I should have just typed in she's never text me again, and then everything would have been fine.
Greg:We're going to talk first about this Kentucky bill that's got the teachers in our area upset. It is Senate Bill 181, and I'll read the first paragraph of the actual page from our Senate, the Kentucky Senate. It's short. I'm going to go ahead and say it like this this will probably be the only true fact that you hear in this podcast, because it's not going to be factual based as much. It is going to be opinion based or, said more properly, reaction and perception based. I know what our government was trying to do, and God bless them, but it's created so many problems that there is now a petition and the last I heard and this isn't a fact either. I think they've got like 15,000 names on it already and we'll go through all that and then I'll give you a few ideas on how I plan to change the way I communicate with students, because they're different. Now here's the paragraph from the official statement from our Kentucky government about the Senate bill. A new student protection law has officially taken effect across Kentucky, establishing guardrails for how school employees, coaches and volunteers may communicate with minors. Senate bill 181 sponsored I won't give the senator's name that sponsored it, but sponsored by one of the senators passed the general assembly 137 to 0 and was signed into law by governor andy beshear in april.
Greg:Now everybody said yes, everybody in the government said yes, and at first glance, if somebody had said, hey, our government's going to pass a law that's going to make it harder or maybe I should say easier to trace inappropriate communication between teachers and students, I would say, well, that sounds fine to me. Here's what's happened. They didn't quite think it through and the repercussions of just doing something blindly is too strong a word. Doing something without fully researching. It's more of a and I don't say this this is going to sound negative, but I'll go ahead and say it. It was sort of a knee-jerk reaction. Now, a lot of thought went into it. I'm not saying that, but they kind of had a knee-jerk reaction.
Greg:There is not a day goes by in our state, unfortunately, where I saw two more in a paper this morning where there's communication about how a teacher inappropriately communicate with a student. I won't say it any more specific than that. You can fill in the blanks. Well, now our government has said well, we want to change our law so that every single piece of communication between a teacher and a student has to be through what amounts to the school's email system. So it is a trackable system, communication source through the school systems. That's the idea behind the bill. That way they've always got a paper trail, so to speak, an electronic paper trail. They can always communicate back and trace the communication back.
Greg:Whereas these articles that you read every day, most of them happen through social media, most of them happen through Facebook, because you can communicate privately through Facebook. I'm going to tell you how. Maybe I would offer one suggestion to the government to help things out, and I'll save that for just a moment here. But here's what's happened now. Even the paragraph that I read mentioned coaches and it didn't say band directors, but any activity like that. Here's what's happened.
Greg:There are all kinds of apps out there. I am looking for one as I talk to you, the one I use, or I should say the head coach used when I was an assistant coach for volleyball. She used both Band and Remind, and the way those apps work. You set up a page that says something to the fact Podunk High School Volleyball 2025. And you let your players know, maybe through a piece of paper or whatever, to subscribe to that app and then the teacher can or I should say that in this case, the coach could then send correspondence and be able to communicate with a team in that way. One correspondence, it goes out to everybody. In fact, on both of these, I believe she also allowed parents to enroll so the parents can see that too. Great app. Enter it one time, everybody can see it. In effect, that's what Facebook is too.
Greg:So they can't do that anymore because that's outside of the school systems communication program. They now have to do that through what amounts to email. They've got to use the school email. Now, I know there are ways to do that and if this doesn't change, I assume, unless they've found somebody's found something better. I assume what they will have to do is when you have a my goodness football teams, when you've got that many players on a team, you're going to have to set up a group email that includes all of them. That's going to take days to do that. It's going to take days. Teachers already have enough to do and that way you could send out one correspondence. In fact, you'd have to do it as like a blind carbon copy, because you don't want everybody you're sending it to to see everybody else's email. So, and if you do it the other way, if you do it in a way that they see everybody else's email, believe me, somebody's going to reply and they're going to click reply all instead of just reply, and it's going to go out to everybody in that group. That's what they're going to have to do, and that's a pain it's.
Greg:Also, some of the teachers take I shouldn't say some of them, all of them take pride in how they have positively affected children's lives, and some of them are pretty tore up that they can no longer communicate with them just a congratulations or something to that effect. They can't communicate with them directly through Facebook or Twitter or whatever because of this new law. So I would have suggested to the government if you had just said don't use Facebook to correspond with a student unless you're communicating with more than one of them at a time. All of this bad stuff, all of this stuff that was inappropriate. Well, that was between one teacher and one student. How about you open it up and say all right, you can no longer communicate on Facebook with one student. You have to send your correspondence to multiple students. That would have at least been easier. I can't imagine the government itself having a problem with like band and remind. That's corresponding with groups at a time as well. So I'll leave it at that. You can make up your own mind what you think is best.
Greg:All of this is in the news. I assume it's even in the national news in some areas, or at least regional. I don't know what else would. I haven't seen anything like that from other schools. I don't know if any other states are doing this or not. I haven't seen anything like that from other schools. I don't know if any other states are doing this or not. I would love to hear from you, gregcollinssubstitute, at gmailcom, and let me know what your state is doing Now communicating with students in the class of 2026, especially those of us that are substitute teachers.
Greg:We just have to be aware of things that are different. Things hit my mind so funny. I was walking down a hallway completely over to the right, almost next to the lockers, and here comes a student. He's looking right at me. He's walking down that same side. He doesn't want to change, so when he got to me he just stopped waiting for me to move out of the way. So you know what I did. I stood there too and I said I guess you're going to have to go that way, and he smiled at me. I bumped his fist and he went on. But that stuff didn't happen back in my day.
Greg:Man, young people always yield it just out of a sign of respect to the older people on how you're supposed to, you know, behave around them. Things have changed I don't want to use the word entitled, although I just did and this generation is just different. Now, I'm not sure it's that different than what my parents went through and what my teachers and communicators went through, because I was born in 58. I was in school during the 60s, which is considered one of the I don't know radicals too strong of a word, one of the most rebellious decades that's a good word rebellious decades in the history of this country, at least from a teenager to authority figure standpoint. So you just have to communicate different with them.
Greg:Understand that this group has known nothing, especially the ones just starting school. The ones just starting school have never known anything else but social media. You got to be aware of that. The attention span is there. Of course, the young kids aren't going to have their phones in the classroom, but you got to be aware of that. Don't be so mean I'll use that word that you make them back down from what they said. One thing I'll say is this when you swear my grandkids as an example, my grandkids will.
Greg:Occasionally. I leave a pair of reading glasses on every end table in our house and one of the grandkids just know that they're doing me a favor when they bring it. They find a pair, they pick it up, they bring it to me two rooms away and they're excited about bringing me those ring glasses. Well, I didn't need them, but I'm going to tell them thank you, because they went out of their way to do that. Do the same with your students this year. Go out of your way to thank them, even though it really didn't mean anything to you, because it meant something to them, the more we can get our mindset away from us personally and get it towards the students. I think that's what we need to do this year.
Greg:Man, I am only. Let's see. This is two more days, three more days in July and 13 in August. So I am 16 days away from. I don't have any substitute teacher jobs yet, but I hope they're coming soon. Hard to get one at the beginning of the year unless there's a long-term position open, because everybody's they're not going to miss the first day of school. I would love to be at one of them. I would love to see the sixth graders that I had so much in the fifth grade last year because they're in a new school. I would love to go back to the school that I spent most of my the elementary school. I spent most of my time in last year and I'm missing it. And I would say 90% of the students I have run into in town for whatever reason, of the students I have run into in town for whatever reason, they miss it too. So we're only a few weeks away and we can get through this.
