Boyle BOE votes not to allow medical marijuana to be administered in school
Published 4:30 pm Wednesday, July 24, 2024
lance.gaither@bluegrassnewsmedia.com
During the Boyle County Board of Education meeting on July 18, the board discussed allowing medical cannabis to be administered in Boyle Schools. Medical cannabis was legalized in Kentucky this month, and the law will go into effect on Jan. 1 of next year. It will be legal to prescribe medical cannabis to minors with eligible medical conditions. State policy leaves the decision to allow medical cannabis to be administered on school grounds up to each district’s leadership.
“We have dug into this to look at what the law says, what other people are doing, and to consider how it will affect us,” said Boyle Superintendent Mark Wade. “There are reasons we would want to consider it. There are medical reasons why students and their parents would seek to utilize medical cannabis. We have students in our schools with those ailments.”
It is illegal in Kentucky to smoke medical cannabis. Wade explained that the board could look at options of how it could be administered to students.
“The question is how do we want to handle it,” Wade said. “Is it something they take before school? Is it something we have to administer? No one has yet landed on dosage, there are still things to iron out. We are seeing most schools across the state are waiting to see how it is prescribed and other concerns. It is new and we don’t quite understand it yet.”
The board voted against allowing medical cannabis in schools on the grounds that it would be difficult to implement a process for administering it mid-school year as it would only be legal to administer in the second half of the upcoming school year. The board will review the decision next summer.
“Not doing this now allows us to learn how it will affect our students, good or bad,” said Board Vice-Chairperson Jesse Johnson. “We won’t never allow it. This time next year I think we will have a much better understanding.”
In other news from the meeting:
— The board approved a renewal of their contract with the Boyle County Sheriff’s Office to provide the school with five school resource officers, one for each school, for the upcoming school year. The total cost of the contract is $145,000.
— The board approved increasing five bus monitor positions to 175 days, 3.5 hours per day positions for the 2024-2025 school year.
“We struggle with filling all the bus monitor positions, and this makes it easier to move things around,” Wade said.