Education: The Foremost Challenge
As tough as new state and national goals for schools and higher education may seem, the Owensboro community hardly starts from ground zero in this area. It added a community college to its base of two fine independent four-year colleges in the 1980s. The Citizens Committee on Education, sparkplug of that effort, has lived on to push for constant improvement. The Daviess County and Owensboro school districts do so well, at least compared with the rest of the state, that they fear the 1990 Kentucky Education Reform Act will actually hold them back, while poor and deficient districts catch up.
Owensboro has a very high incidence of single-parent households—reportedly as high as 70 percent. Nearly half the kids qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches. Still, the city educates so well that no grade level falls below national averages on standardized tests.
Both the city and county schools have seen their college-going rates increase dramatically in recent years. There was evidence of long-term thinking in former Owensboro Superintendent J. Frank Yeager’s tough challenges to invest early and often in the youngest children, especially those from troubled homes.
But just when you think Owensboro education is a success story, you hear of employer after employer who can’t find qualified workers. When WorldSource came to Hancock County and started hiring, it was shocked to find 3,000 of the 4,500 applicants had to be ruled out because of insufficient skills. And clearly there’s lots of underemployment. In 1989, when Pinkerton Tobacco advertised for 20 openings, more than 1,200 would-be workers applied.
Then there’s the problem that more than 21,000 adults in Daviess County have less than a high school education. And we hear that a persistent anti-intellectualism holds on, especially in lower-income white families where education isn’t taken seriously. School officials tell sadly of parents marching into school on their child’s 16th birthday to remove the child from the classroom. That might once have been a rational act, given the lower-skilled employment needs of 1950. But today, parents who make that choice may condemn their kids to perpetual poverty.
Add to that the projection that of the 348,000 new jobs likely to be created in Kentucky by the year 2000, more than 90 percent will require at least two years of college.
All that suggests to us there’s much for the Owensboro-Daviess community to address on the education front. This is no time for complacency.