By David Horowitz / david.horowitz@bgdailynews.com

About a week from the election, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul and Kentucky Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman spoke at two events advocating opposite sides of the controversial ballot measure Amendment 2.

Advocacy groups on both sides typically agree on little more than what the constitutional amendment states it’ll do: allow taxpayer dollars to go toward educational options that aren’t traditional public schools, such as voucher programs for private schools.

At the Tuesday morning news conference at the site of United Auto Workers Local 2164, Coleman spoke after remarks by Kentucky Senate District 5 Candidate Jamie Skudlarek and Brenda McGown, a retired educator at Warren East High School and chair of Kentucky’s Teacher Retirement System Board of Education speaking in her personal capacity. One hundred and five people attended the Monday evening rally, which featured speakers Paul, his wife Kelley Paul, former Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron and Heather LeMire, the state director of Americans for Prosperity-Kentucky, the organization that hosted the event.

Kelley Paul said she and her husband’s two older children graduated from Bowling Green High School, and they had great teachers and administrators.

“So, our support for Amendment 2 is in no way a criticism of our teachers and administrators,” she said. “We have a lot of good ones in Kentucky.”

That praise for the work of local public schools here might as well have been the one agreed-upon sentiment between the two events. McGown, at the next day’s conference, spotlighted the importance of local public school initiatives such as the learning centers, the upcoming Bowling Green vocational center and the Warren County Public Schools’ in-the-works IMPACT Center for Leadership and Innovation; she also highlighted the two districts’ work with immigrant families and collaboration with the Bowling Green Area Chamber of Commerce.

Where speakers at the two events disagreed was whether and how Amendment 2 will affect that.

“Amendment 2 is not going to change that,” Kelly Paul continued, speaking on good administrators and teachers. “What Amendment 2 will do is give us an opportunity to have a voice, because while we have some great schools and great teachers in Kentucky, it’s not working in every aspect of Kentucky, in every city of Kentucky, some truly struggling not only with dismal scores but also violence, and it is not fair to ask those kids to go to a school where they really have no choice and no opportunity for the future.”

Amendment 2 doesn’t create any programs – but it does open the door for programs, such as private school vouchers, to exist.

That money would need to come from somewhere – and Amendment 2 opponents fear it will siphon needed funds from public schools.

Rand Paul told the Daily News that if Amendment 2 passed, it’d be best to start with “something small” for a program.

Rand Paul added that he believes programs created due to its passage would come from the state’s rainy day fund of approximately $4 billion – a point of contention between the opposing sides of the issue.

At Tuesday’s conference, when a Daily News reporter asked Coleman about Rand Paul’s surplus comment, the idea drew some laughs from the crowd.

Coleman responded by pointing to Kentucky’s underfunding for school transportation; while Kentucky is mandated to fully fund transportation, it hasn’t since 2005.

“That surplus in the budget exists, and we’re still not fully funding transportation, textbooks, technology, classroom resources; we still don’t have universal pre-K for every 4-year-old,” Coleman said.

“There’s a lot of things that that budget surplus can be used for, but it should be used to support 90% of Kentucky’s kids and students, not just a few who go to a private school … .”

On that point, opponents of Amendment 2 argue that programs such as vouchers would primarily benefit students from higher-income families at the cost of lower-income families.

About 65%-90% of voucher dollars in other states support students whose families either enrolled them into private schools or are planning to do so, according to the nonprofit think tank Kentucky Center of Economic Policy.

Coleman’s point has also been separately supported by area school superintendents.

At Bowling Green schools’ August Board of Education meeting, Superintendent Gary Fields said the district has been told “budget cycle after budget cycle that there’s just no more money” for the state’s education budget.

At Warren County schools’ Board of Education meeting in September, Superintendent Rob Clayton said it’s important to understand that despite having the emergency surplus, Kentucky hasn’t allotted such funds to public schools. He had added that WCPS is educating students with the inflationary equivalent of $1,300 less per student than it did in 2008.

Speakers from the two events also look differently at how Amendment 2 would affect rural schools.

Rand Paul spoke on the possibilities opening up if Amendment 2 passes, such as a program where people can use a voucher for children with special needs. Skudlarek’s statement on it surrounded the fact that nearly half of Kentucky’s rural counties don’t have a private school – meaning that taxpayer-funded programs supporting private schools would largely go to such schools in non-rural counties.

“If you want to know what Amendment 2 means for rural Kentucky, just take a look at the Senate seat that I run for, District 5: Between all five counties, Butler, Ohio, Grayson, Breckenridge and Meade, we only have two certified private schools, while we have almost 40 public schools who depend on our public dollars just to survive,” she said.