FRANKFORT, Ky. (Dec. 18, 2025)– Attorney General Russell Coleman sounded the alarm about the consequences of the Kentucky Supreme Court’s decision to overturn a critical education law today. In a 4-3 decision, the Supreme Court invalidated 2022’s Senate Bill 1 (SB 1), which the General Assembly passed to empower a superintendent in a sprawling county school district like Jefferson County Public Schools. Under that law, the leaders of large county school districts would act like a chief executive officer with the school board as the district’s board of directors.
“I am stunned that our Supreme Court reversed itself based only on a new justice joining the Court,” said Attorney General Coleman. “This decision is devastating for JCPS students and leaves them trapped in a failing system while sabotaging the General Assembly’s rescue mission.”
Since 2024, Attorney General Coleman has defended the law’s constitutionality before the courts. Last year, the Kentucky Supreme Court agreed with the Attorney General and ruled SB 1 constitutional. When a new justice joined the Court, a slim majority of justices took the extraordinary and questionable decision to rehear the case.
In his dissent, Justice Shea Nickell strongly criticized the majority’s questionable decision to flip the court’s previous decision, driven only by the addition of one new justice: “I am profoundly disturbed by the damage and mischief such a brazen manipulation of the rehearing standard will inflict on the stability and integrity of our judicial decision-making process in the future.” Chief Justice Debra Hembree Lambert and Deputy Chief Justice Robert B. Conley joined the dissent.
In August, another lawsuit was filed using the same legal theory the Supreme Court used to overturn SB 1. That suit challenges the constitutionality of the Jefferson County / Louisville merger. The Supreme Court’s decision today has now opened the door to the unraveling of 20 years of the merger and threatening everything from policing to trash collection in Jefferson County.
Kentucky’s Solicitor General Matt Kuhn twice argued the SB 1 case before the Supreme Court.